Authorized Member-Financed Activities Subcategory naming and Deleting old subcategories

[radradryan]

Is there a standard notation for creating Authorized Member-Financed Activities subcategories? Currently they are being listed as "O-Girls Camp", "O-Young Men Camp"...etc. Is the "O" a standard we should be following or is this just unique to our ward and how the previous clerk formatted his subcategory names?
Next question:
Other than setting old subcategories to "Inactive" is there a way to actually delete them from the list? I just don't like the clutter and it seems in the past some were created by mistake or duplicated.

[drepouille]

IIRC, you can't delete inactive AMFA subcategories until they have been inactive for the financial retention period (three years plus the current year). However, I have lost track of those rules.

[russellhltn]

IIRC, you can't delete inactive AMFA subcategories until they have been inactive for the financial retention period (three years plus the current year). However, I have lost track of those rules.

However, I think you can mark them inactive which will make them disappear from the common reports.

[russellhltn]

Is there a standard notation for creating Authorized Member-Financed Activities subcategories? Currently they are being listed as "O-Girls Camp", "O-Young Men Camp"...etc. Is the "O" a standard we should be following or is this just unique to our ward and how the previous clerk formatted his subcategory names?

A couple of possibilities: It might be to keep them sorted together in a list. Or, it might be to remind the leaders this is "Other" and not "Budget" (which has restrictions on how it can be used). Others will have to weigh in to know how useful this would be.

[davesudweeks]

The subcategories can be named pretty much anything you want them to (at least they could when I was clerk a few years ago. However, drepouille is correct that you cannot delete them until they have been at zero for the financial retention period. I think they go away on their own after they have been inactivated and there are no transactions in them for the retention period, but I'm not sure about that. Make sure you don't let any money get moved into or out of them as that will reset the clock

[lajackson]

Everyone is correct. Once you inactivate an account and it stays that way for the current year plus 3 (or whatever the financial retention period is in your country), the account will go away.

I would add that the O- in the subaccount name is not required, but it comes from the time long ago when all of these miscellaneous things were in the Other account. The budget categories were all B- and so on. And yes, it was used for sorting accounts in MLS (and before that FIS) reports.

I am sure everyone remembers MIS and FIS, right? [grin]

[drepouille]

Well, I do remember the printed membership records with all the holes on the edge. Back in the 1980s, when I was ward clerk, my assistant for finance wouldn't allow me to see or touch the financial records, so I don't know what they looked like back then.

[jonesrk]

I am sure everyone remembers MIS and FIS, right? [grin]

I do. One of the cool things with the MIS reports is that you could navigate to them by looking at the number on the top of the report.

[russellhltn]

Well, I do remember the printed membership records with all the holes on the edge.

My most treasured tool was a red pen to mark corrections. If you used blue or black, there was a very good chance the SLC data entry person would miss the correction - especially if there were multiple corrections.

One thing to be said for the paper records - no one ever confused a listing on the parent's record with having the child's record. If you didn't have a sheet of paper with their name at the top, you didn't have their record. But now it's just all screens on a computer that look too much alike.

As for FIS, I think I independently hit on the idea of individual subcategories for Ward Missionaries. Otherwise, it was a nightmare keeping things straight. The task was made more difficult because we had a couple of missionaries supported by the stake. And the stake would cut a check for the whole year. That big balance tended to hide the shortfalls in the family supported missionaries until I hit on using subcategories.

[radradryan]

Thanks for the answers and a trip down memory lane!
-Ryan