Tech Forum

I was initially called as a Ward Clerk when MLS was first rolled out in Australia (I wonder if it was a coincidence that I had just been hired by the Church to handle the rollout of the local unit PCs?) and MLS was missing great chunks of functionality that were to be added later.

I have now been called as Ward Clerk again and was surprised to find that MLS has had many new features added but still has nowhere to record sacrament meeting attendance. You have to keep a record yourself and then average it for the quarterly report.

Currently I just write the figure on the back of the envelope I store the tithing receipts in but it would be nice if MLS prompted you to enter the figure when you close off the tithing, then it could automatically average it and add it to the quarterly report.

MLS development team, what do you think?

When I was ward clerk a few years back, I kept sacrament meeting attendance in a spreadsheet and then had the spreadsheet do the averaging for me. You should have a spreadsheet that came with MLS in the Open Office software.

Maybe they could add a "Sacrament Meeting Detail" tab to the "Report" and "Convert Detail" tabs on the Quarterly Report screen.

We just built our own spreadsheet, so that we could nice little graphs showing the attendance trends...

I've thought about the same thing. However, a few questions come to my mind.

1. Do the weekly attendence numbers really have to be saved with all the other ward records?
2. What advantage does it give a ward to have such numbers in MLS?

Whether the numbers are store inside or outside MLS, the important thing is that they are kept for historical analysis to identify trends.

In my opinion, adding functionality to MLS for tracking attendence in MLS could provide two things: backups and transmission to the stake level. I'm the membership clerk and to my knowledge my ward does not backup the Windows directories containing non-MLS data (e.g. attendence records). Having these records in MLS could provide a way to backup those records in an easy fashion (non-technical users would not have to deal with trying to backup Windows directories). The other great benefit would be transmission to the stake level. Our stake president wanted to aggregate the weekly sacrament meeting attendence to see if, on a stake level, we were improving our attendence. In order to do that, we've had to email our weekly numbers to the stake clerk who then prepares his own analysis for the stake president. This could all be eliminated if MLS had functionality to input weekly attendence numbers. Then a weekly transmission could be sent to the stake.

You can record your wards attendance in the quarterly report feature of MLS. Click on Reports/Forms then select Quarterly Report. Notice that line 2 is for Average Sacrament meeting attendance. This information is sent to the stake via a Send / Recieve.

I had the same problem, and I did the excel thing too. At one point I wasgetting released as a ward clerk, and the clerk that was taking over ask me tomake two years of attendance spreadsheet. So I decided and created a web siteto keep track of this. Some of the features that I have is sacramentattendance, building key management and soon come away to keep track of talkassignments. The URL for this site is http://clerksassistant.host22.com/.