Reimbursement of funds to Agent Ward

[khasay12]

During the year, we as the Agent Ward have paid expenses for Library, Sacrament Cups, etc. Now we are billing the other wards in the building for their share of these expenses. We originally paid these expenses from our Administrative Sub Category. I know this is a dumb question, but when I receive payments from the other wards, I assume that I put the funds back into that Sub Category. I don't use the Allocation Category right????

[aebrown]

During the year, we as the Agent Ward have paid expenses for Library, Sacrament Cups, etc. Now we are billing the other wards in the building for their share of these expenses. We originally paid these expenses from our Administrative Sub Category. I know this is a dumb question, but when I receive payments from the other wards, I assume that I put the funds back into that Sub Category. I don't use the Allocation Category right????

Right. You want the net effect to be to reduce the expense that hits your budget in your chosen subcategory for the expense. So you need to deposit the checks from the other wards into that same subcategory.

Don't ever deposit into the Budget Allocations subcategory anything except an allocation check from the stake (which most stakes don't even do).

[atticusewig]

While certainly more work, we have always used an Other / AMFA account to receive agent fund reimbursements,
and then wrote one check to ourselves to the budget category used.
The rationale was that in the past, any deposits to a budget category would raise a red flag during audit time,
and we wanted to minimize the number of budget category deposits.
I don't know if this is necessary anymore, but a few versions back we were hit with a bug in MLS in which making
a category adjustment to items in BU-DistributionCenter to any other budget category double-charged us, so
when we tried to recategorize orders from STAPLES for shared expenses it did cause a bit of a mess. Depositing
a check directly into BU-DistributionCenter would have entirely avoided everything.
Have you heard anything new about depositing directly into Budget Categories; is it still discouraged, or now
more acceptable ?

- Atticus

[aebrown]

The rationale was that in the past, any deposits to a budget category would raise a red flag during audit time, and we wanted to minimize the number of budget category deposits.
...
Have you heard anything new about depositing directly into Budget Categories; is it still discouraged, or now more acceptable?

There has never been an audit problem with making deposits to a budget category. If an auditor was blindly treating that as a rule, he was making up a restriction that never existed. In fact, the word "budget" doesn't even appear anywhere in the ward audit instructions, which is further confirmation that anything along these lines is outside of audit procedures. Of course, you don't make inappropriate deposits to the Budget category in an attempt to get around the budget allowance program, but we're not talking about that here. If auditors don't understand this, they need training -- the answer is not for wards and stakes to do convoluted procedures to avoid red flags in audits that shouldn't even be an issue.

I have personally deposited all sorts of funds into Budget categories. Because I am a stake financial clerk, we get checks from wards for a variety of purposes. Some of them are funded entirely by wards, but many are situations where the stake pays a portion and the wards pay a portion. Yes, we could use Other:AMFA, but that seems like a hassle. And besides, AMFA stands for Authorized Member Financed Activities. These are not Member-Financed activities, so that part would be inaccurate anyway. So I just pay expenses from a budget subcategory and make deposits of ward checks in that same subcategory. It's nice and clean, with all expenses appearing in one Budget Detail report. Wards who handle agent ward expenses can do the same. I can't imagine why you'd want to do it any other way.