CUBS Message Section - Budget Allocation

[crislapi]

There appear to be two ways to assign money to the budget subcategories. You can do it through the "View/Edit Budget" dialog, or you can do it through transfers. Strangely, when I did it through the View/Edit Budget dialog, it created positive balances on my income and expense report. If I specified an allotment of $100 to the Elders Quorum and then transferred $100 to Elders Quorum, the income and expense report showed $200 in the Elders Quorum subcategory.

In the end, I'm left wondering what is really happening. Are we supposed to be making allocations using the View/Edit Budget dialog, or are we supposed to be physically making transfers? Or are these essentially the same thing?

I noticed the same thing. I have no definite answers, but here are my thoughts. Had you done this at the beginning of the year, you wouldn't be transferring balances. Because we are doing it towards the end of the year, I still don't think you want to transfer balances (to your subcategories). Instead, you want to use the view/edit budget to assign starting balances for your subcategories.

What you do what to do is transfer your expenses from the main category to the subcategory. This can be accomplished by transferring positive values from your subcategories to the main category. Essentially, this makes the yearly expenses appear in your transfers category. A budget report will therefore show starting amount, expenses and remaining balance.

I do think this is a bit of a tweak to make the new system fit the old. I think this is something we only need to do for the remainder of 2010 and come 2011 it will be much cleaner. Again, just what I think.

[russellhltn]

I think this is something we only need to do for the remainder of 2010 and come 2011 it will be much cleaner.

From what I understand, the balance rolls over into next year. So I fail to see how this all gets better come January.

[crislapi]

From what I understand, the balance rolls over into next year. So I fail to see how this all gets better come January.

Good point. I can't say for sure obviously, but I think one of the things making 2010 so confusing is that you have 4 years of information all added at once. When 2011 starts, viewing current year should just show my balance forward from 2010, and then just 2011 expenses, transfers, etc. Also, as 2011 proceeds, all my expenses will be categorized into the correct subcategories so budget reports and income and expense reports will be more like what we were used to.

[aebrown]

There appear to be two ways to assign money to the budget subcategories. You can do it through the "View/Edit Budget" dialog, or you can do it through transfers. Strangely, when I did it through the View/Edit Budget dialog, it created positive balances on my income and expense report. If I specified an allotment of $100 to the Elders Quorum and then transferred $100 to Elders Quorum, the income and expense report showed $200 in the Elders Quorum subcategory.

I noticed the same thing. I have not definite answers, but here are my thoughts. Had you done this at the beginning of the year, you wouldn't be transferring balances. Because we are doing it towards the end of the year, I still don't think you want to transfer balances (to your subcategories). Instead, you want to use the view/edit budget to assign starting balances for your subcategories.

What you do what to do is transfer your expenses from the main category to the subcategory. This can be accomplished by transferring positive values from your subcategories to the main category. Essentially, this makes the yearly expenses appear in your transfers category. A budget report will therefore show starting amount, expenses and remaining balance.

I'm not seeing that. The numbers I enter in the View/Edit Budget screen do not appear at all on the Income and Expense Report. The View/Edit Budget screen creates no actual transfers, so I wouldn't expect it to affect the Income/Expense Report, and indeed it doesn't, in my experience.

The strangeness appears in the Budget Report. For that report, there is an extra column for the allocation. At this point, I have not transferred any money to any Budget subcategories, so the Budget Report looks just fine (note that I have changed the categories for all my 2010 expenses to have specific new categories -- they are not in Budget:Administration anymore).

But the documentation seems to imply that we should be transferring actual funds to each auxiliary ("Using the Transfer functionality in MLS, you can move balances to auxiliary subcategories"). If I do that, then the Income and Expense Report will make more sense, but the Budget Report will then essentially double count the income.

I'm not sure what to do about this. I'm leaning towards not transferring any funds to auxiliaries, and just using the Budget Report as we always have. That way the auxiliaries will see their remaining budget allocation throughout the year, but that the ward/stake will have to absorb any difference between the annual budget planned before the beginning of the year and the actual allocations. But we're used to that. It also means at the end of the year I'll have to do some transferring of actual funds to auxiliary subcategories. Then we can decide what we want to do for auxiliary carryover to the next year.

[crislapi]

I'm not seeing that. The numbers I enter in the View/Edit Budget screen do not appear at all on the Income and Expense Report. The View/Edit Budget screen creates no actual transfers, so I wouldn't expect it to affect the Income/Expense Report, and indeed it doesn't, in my experience.

Thank you for clarifying, Alan_Brown. I read the original post too quickly to catch that he referred to the Income and Expense report. You are correct in that I saw the double income only in the Budget Report, not the Income and Expense report.

I would also hazard a guess that nutterb misspoke when he said it was the income and expense report.

[nutterb]

Thank you for clarifying, Alan_Brown. I read the original post too quickly to catch that he referred to the Income and Expense report. You are correct in that I saw the double income only in the Budget Report, not the Income and Expense report.

I would also hazard a guess that nutterb misspoke when he said it was the income and expense report.

Ack! you're right. Sorry for creating confusion.

[slmsz20]

The income/expense report vs. budget report is really confusing at the stake level right now. I "zeroed" out the legacy carry over categories (still trying to figure out how administration could start out negative). Since this information is not showing on the budget report, it made all those sub categories negative balances. The carry forward negative balance that gets the correct remaining stake budget does not carry to the budget screen either, so you are left with a gigantic number that in no way reflects the actual budget.

One solution I've found is putting negative allocations in those categories on the view/edit budget, to balance them to the income/expense report. I have no idea if this is correct procedure, but it is making the budget balances look more realistic. Writing checks does show your correct remaining balance.

I am really annoyed how old problems came back with this conversion. Several wards in my stake had hidden balances (main category read 0 but there was a large positive/negative balance in ward specific subcategories that were hiding the problem. Some of these issues were from the FIS days that carried over to the MLS, and we recently fixed them. We now get to fix them again because the 3 year timer was reset.

So far my experience is:
Tax change for Utah is confusing initially (completely reverses what we've done for the last forever), hoping to get the rest of my clerks this week before they eat the sales tax for their reimbursements.
The delay caused a lot of problems, since I had my stake getting ready for the switch over for a few weeks when the august announcements hit, then boom 2 month delay, and everyone moves on until surprise announcement hits (of course no one printed anything the instructions told them to, it's a wonder if they read their MLS emails at all).
The missionary account is the easiest to fix, I was grateful for this one.
I wish the distribution center could post a detail report of purchases, so I could track down those ghost purchases, I'm praying no one is abusing the unit number purchase at the distribution center.
I do wish the allocation screen showed a per person allocation dollar amount. The new system does not save me any time, since I still have to use a spreadsheet to figure out %/dollar ratio so I can equalize my stake allocations correctly and then copy the resulting percentages back to the MLS.

[aebrown]

I wish the distribution center could post a detail report of purchases, so I could track down those ghost purchases, I'm praying no one is abusing the unit number purchase at the distribution center.

A summary would be nice, but the bishop or stake president is always sent an additional copy of each invoice. So it shouldn't be that hard to compare those invoices with the automatic distribution center charges that are now downloaded to MLS.

I do wish the allocation screen showed a per person allocation dollar amount. The new system does not save me any time, since I still have to use a spreadsheet to figure out %/dollar ratio so I can equalize my stake allocations correctly and then copy the resulting percentages back to the MLS.

Your stake is welcome to do this, but it sounds like a lot of extra work. The official recommendation is that "We encourage the stake and the wards to learn the new method. " That means allocating percentages to the wards. If you choose to work with the new system, that means you would set percentages and then only rarely if ever need to adjust them. Our stake has selected a percentage to give to the wards and we have no plans to change that.

[waynecooke]

The above entry spoke of a ward that retained 40 percent of their budget for use in the fourth quarter. In our ward, we have spent more that 75 percent of our yearly allotment so far. Will we then get from the Stake the remainder of our yearly allotment rather than the entire fourth quarter allotment?

[aebrown]

The above entry spoke of a ward that retained 40 percent of their budget for use in the fourth quarter. In our ward, we have spent more that 75 percent of our yearly allotment so far. Will we then get from the Stake the remainder of our yearly allotment rather than the entire fourth quarter allotment?

The stake is supposed to give you your remaining budget allocation. That is the total of your allocations (however the stake may have calculated them for 2010) less all your expenses through October 17. For some wards that might be 20% of their budget, for others it might be 40%. It all depends on how much they spent through October 17.

Assuming you were tracking your budget properly, you could have run a Budget Report at the end of the day on October 17. The remaining budget balance at the bottom of that report should be the same as what the stake will give you. So although the means of accounting changes, the budget balance should be just the same as under the previous system.