Reimbursed Expenses

[aebrown]

In stake MLS, there is a special subcategory of Other called "Reimbursed Expense," which then has several subcategories. I've recently started to updated the wiki article Expenses to reflect how these subcategories work under CUBS.

Most of these are straightforward and need no further explanation, or have been documented elsewhere. But a couple of the categories don't seem obvious. Could anyone help me understand:

• Computer Equipment Repair. Under the current Policies and Guidelines for Computers Used by Clerks for Church Record Keeping, all repairs that cost money are done by the FM group. So I don't see what this category could appropriately be used for at the stake level.
• Missionary Travel. Does anyone know of any document that explains how this category might be appropriately used by a stake?

[johnshaw]

Check the FHC computer policy, there is a section under repairing out of warranty hardware.

[wrigjef]

I have some pretty strong negative feelings about the reasoning behind the Missionary Travel Account but I will try to curb that.

In the case of our stake, what we were instructed to do was to use that fund to reimburse a member that had to travel across country to transport some missionaries home that were in "danger" of being detained for illegal immigration reasons. I issued checks out of that account to a brother who drove across country a couple of times. This was for gas and some milage related maintenance.

That was the only occasion that our stake has ever used that account.

[aebrown]

Check the FHC computer policy, there is a section under repairing out of warranty hardware.

It's interesting that the FHC computer policy says to use the category "Other: Authorized Computer Repairs"; prior to CUBS, there was also an "Other: FHC Computer Repair" category, which seems like it was more appropriate. But now that the only category related to computer repair is the "Reimbursed Expenses:Computer Equipment Repair," which seems to be the one you would use for FHC computer repairs.

It's odd that the FHC-specific category is the one that was removed in the CUBS transition, when the only remaining authorized use of a reimbursed category for computer repairs is related to the FHC.

[johnshaw]

FHC is also in a transition with their computers, if your center gets updated you no longer are able to accept donated computers, and I imagine that the policy would change to one like the clerk computer where FM pays that cost. It would be helpful to bring the policies up-to-date with these types of changes.