cubs conversion - budget

Discuss questions around local unit policies for budgeting, reconciling, etc. This forum should not contain specific financial or membership information.
nj6a
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cubs conversion - budget

#1

Post by nj6a »

Upon MLS CUBS conversion all payments posted to budget sub catagories have been reposted to a single budget (main?) catagory. This appears to be true for all past periods. I want to provide my bishop with a budget report for the current year. I am concerned that if I use the "transfers" system for posting budget expenses for any period (or the current period) to correct the budget sub-catagories the report will look very strange (all expenses prior to 10-17-10 will be in the transfer collumn and I will have no detail history to refer to or print up to support the dollars showing on the budget report.
So I propose to go back to all checks posted to budget for 2010 and re-post them to appropriate budget sub-catagorys, instead of the approach apparently recomended via the transfers system.

Is there some objection to my reposting of checks for 2010 from the Budger (main?) to budget sub catagories?
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aebrown
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#2

Post by aebrown »

nj6a wrote:Is there some objection to my reposting of checks for 2010 from the Budget (main?) to budget sub catagories?
There is no particular objection. At least two clerks have already done this successfully. I would recommend that you figure out your starting balances before you do this, because you'll have fewer transactions to sift through, but you can do that afterwards, if you'd like.

I'm guessing the documentation recommends that you not do this because transfers are simpler. There's less risk of making additional errors.

If you have detailed budget reports from Jan 1- Oct 17, you could just give those to anyone who needs them, along with an Oct 24 - present report. Then you could take the simpler route of doing the transfers.

But it's really up to you.
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crislapi
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#3

Post by crislapi »

The only objection I've seen comes from the new e-doc sent down tonight. It says:
Do not transfer previously recorded expenses from Budget: Administration. You may be tempted to adjust all of the old expenses to the new Budget subcategories. THIS IS NOT RECOMMENDED. Doing so will not allow you to have an accurate picture of correct running balances.
Some potential work-arounds are mentioned at the bottom of this post.

The only other thing stopping you is time - budget a lot of it. A single transfer can take about 20 seconds now. Not all that bad for one or two, but when you have 600 to do, that's about 3.5 hours. See additional comments here.
nj6a
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#4

Post by nj6a »

Alan_Brown
Thank you for your hopeful and helpful post. I got another post from Crislapi which indicated that doing this is not recomended because it will cause inaccuracy in running balances. Did these two clerks you mention come up with this problem? Or is this running balance problem related to the CUFS for October that none of us have yet?

John
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aebrown
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#5

Post by aebrown »

nj6a wrote:Alan_Brown
Thank you for your hopeful and helpful post. I got another post from Crislapi which indicated that doing this is not recomended because it will cause inaccuracy in running balances. Did these two clerks you mention come up with this problem? Or is this running balance problem related to the CUFS for October that none of us have yet?
The two clerks I mentioned are myself and Crislapi :). There may be others, but we're the only ones that I've seen here on the forum who have specifically mentioned that we've done it.

Personally, I don't see how it would make any difference whether I have a running balance all consolidated in the Budget:Administration category, or spread through a variety of Budget subcategories. All that matters is the total budget balance, and moving items between budget subcategories won't change that one penny.

However, as I mentioned, it might be easier to get your balances straight before making any transfers -- waiting for the October statement will make sure that you have all the information in front of you at that point.
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crislapi
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#6

Post by crislapi »

Alan_Brown wrote:Personally, I don't see how it would make any difference whether I have a running balance all consolidated in the Budget:Administration category, or spread through a variety of Budget subcategories. All that matters is the total budget balance, and moving items between budget subcategories won't change that one penny.
The only issue I see is that all the transfers, etc that have been set up with CUBS makes your balance exactly zero on Oct 17 (or thereabouts). When you recategorize expenses, it moves just the expense to the new category but the covering transfer remains in the original category (likely Budget:Administration). So when you look at just the new category, your balance will be more negative than CUBS would have it (all the expenses before Oct 17 have been essentially zeroed).

If you just look at your overall budget, this does not matter. However, when we move to next year, these subcategories may carry forward a more negative balance than you intended. The fix, then, is to not only recategorize the expense but also transfer a credit to the subcategory equal to the total of expenses pre-Oct 17. That way, your subcategory balance matches what CUBS would have.

I am holding off making this transfer until the end of the year. This is to spare my committee heads the headache of trying to interpret a new budget report. Instead, I will use view/edit budgets to reenter their 2010 total budget amounts and reprint budget reports for them. This will show their total 2010 expenses and their true remaining balance. If I do the transfer now, it'll add to the allocation amount, producing an artificially inflated balance. I would then have to either reduce the 2010 budget amount by the amount of the transfer and have to explain to them that no I didn't really reduce their budget, or leave the original amount the same and try to get them to accept that they have (significantly) less remaining budget than the report shows. It's just easier to hold off.

Oh, and I would add jshawut to the list.
nj6a
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#7

Post by nj6a »

crislapi,

Thank you for your helpful posts. I have been a finance clerk for several recent years. However, my membership has been changed to a new ward (a few months ago) and I am newly called for my new ward effective just in time for the CUBS conversion. I am dependent upon the stake finance and ward clerks for forwarding to me of any e-mail CUBS conversion instruction. I have not received the e-mail from either of these sources yet. Can I sign up for these?

John NJ6A (ham radio callsign)
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aebrown
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#8

Post by aebrown »

nj6a wrote: I am dependent upon the stake finance and ward clerks for forwarding to me of any e-mail instruction CUBS conversion instruction. I have not received the e-mail from either of these sources yet. Can I sign up for these?
There's no mailing list to subscribe to. The most recent communication was emailed to stake clerks (not to the stake financial clerk or ward clerks). Hopefully the stake clerk would have forwarded the message promptly to the financial clerks (but I know that communication is not perfect in all stakes).

But the good news is that all this information was known on this forum even before it was sent to the stake clerks. Particularly during times of change, such as we are experiencing now, I find LDSTech to be the best source of information -- it covers all the official communications, and plenty of real-life lessons from the community. So I'd recommend that you keep an eye on what's happening here, and you'll most likely be on top of the latest news.
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crislapi
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#9

Post by crislapi »

nj6a wrote:I have not received the e-mail from either of these sources yet. Can I sign up for these?
No need to sign up. The messages I have received have been sent down through MLS or posted here on the forum. The new e-doc can be found at this link. It should also appear in MLS with your Finance Statements as a pdf on your next send/receive. The original CUBS transition instructions can be found at this link or in your MLS messages received folder.
crislapi
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#10

Post by crislapi »

I had a thought about how you can keep up on new threads. I use google reader and an RSS feed to automatically receive notification of new threads on the forum. It only notifies you of the first post. You have to monitor the thread on your own from there.

See this post for more about it.
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