chriswoodut wrote:
For example (my made up numbers):
1. YW have $2000 for camp this year. They have a BUDGET category called YW Camp.
2. We paid $1000/50% down on the camp BEFORE the fund raiser occurred. The expense came out of the YW Camp budget category. The balance remaining in the YW Camp budget is $1000. This is good.
3. We did a fundraiser. We now have $2000 in an OTHER category.
4. If I change the expense from #2 above by editing the entry to be from the OTHER instead of the BUDGET category, the YM Camp budget will go back UP to $2000. The YW organization may then think they have $2000 remaining to spend on the camp. This is bad.
5. I can go in and change the YW Camp budget to now be $1000 to reflect the actual remaining money but that is ugly and messy. I lose my historical budget information that I want to have when I make next year's budget. It is also confusing because it changes the numbers on paper (but not in reality) that everyone agreed to at the beginning of the year. This is bad.
I'm assuming here that you are expecting camp to cost $2000 total.
If you can allocate $2000 from the budget to camp and still keep the ward budget balanced then you should not have a fundraiser at all. Policy is that all expenses should be paid out of budget if possible.
If, however, you can only actually manage $1000 out of budget funds then you should set the budget to $1000 to start with. The fundraiser should then target raising the additional $1000. If the fundraiser falls short then you have to see if you can adjust the budget to take funds from elsewhere or find ways to cut costs. If it brings in more then you again adjust the budget to reallocate the additional funds as the bishop decides. The same applies if a fundraiser was held when it really didn't need to be.
To get historical expenses you just run a budget report (for the budget component) and a Income/Expense report (for the Other component) and add the two together. It's a bit more work but the advantages of re-categorizing expenses is well worth it.
Don't try to track historical budget allocations in MLS. It doesn't work well and it's not intended for that purpose. Use an external spreadsheet or just print and date the budget at the beginning of each year and put it in a file folder. Add notes as necessary.