Tech Forum

We are considering going paperless with our membership records. Based on what I have read here, it seems as though there is no requirement to keep a hard copy of membership records (or the MLS transaction summaries). Does anyone know of where this can be confirmed in the official training/instruction material? Are there any membership-related records that need to be kept in hard-copy form? Thanks!

This has been discussed several times in other threads. Here are just a few:

How long do we need to keep hardcopies of membership records?
Membership Record Update Report
Record Retention Guidelines for Food Orders, Finances, Membership Records

jfr2779 wrote:Does anyone know of where this can be confirmed in the official training/instruction material?

In addition to the helpful links jdlessley provided, I would simply note on this point that it's difficult to prove a negative. You'll never find any official training material that says that you must keep a printed membership record for each member. For me, that's good enough to show that any tradition of keeping a printed record is no more than tradition or a local practice. But I don't think you'll be able to find an explicit official statement that says it is not required, either.

jfr2779 wrote:(or the MLS transaction summaries)

I agree with what others have said. I would keep the move out report for a short while in case there is a need to figure out where a member went or retrieve a record, but it is not required, and you can get current bishop information from Headquarters if needed.

The links jdlessley provided also refer to the fact that disciplinary status is not shown in MLS unless you actually Print or at least Print Preview the record or observe a comment on the transaction report. We carefully check for this information for any new records received.

Even so, the bishop personally can call up an MLS report that will provide him with this information for all of the current members of his ward.

And we usually allow the IOS to print and give it to the member.

We just had a new bishop called. The previous bishop liked to have all the membership records printed out and kept in a binder. Our new bishop is a little more internet savvy, and prefers to just view the records on LDS.org. So he told me to just shred all the hard copies. I'm so glad too, because it was incredibly tedious to try and keep a big thick binder up to date.