Request for organization president to approve expenses

[lance.hawkes]

I just received a call from our Relief Society president concerned about not having visibility into online expense requests and therefore losing some control of her budget. She also can't see submitted/approved expenses within LCR under budget summary. It seems that it would be beneficial to have expenses for an organization to be routed to the president of the organization for approval prior to it being routed to the bishopric.

[russellhltn]

I agree it would be a nice courtesy, but if I were to be picky, a reading of the Handbook doesn't mention doing that.

I'm curious about how these requests are bypassing her and getting into the system. Since the general membership doesn't have a way to submit expenses, either she's not in control of her presidency or the members are going directly to the clerk. Other groups shouldn't be able to attach expenses to the RS budget unless permissions has been misconfigured.

[BrianEdwards]

For manually-submitted expenses, it seems many units have a written form that includes the org president's signature as part of the "approval". Although technically (as stated above) I believe only "authorization" is required, the signature is not specified as a requirement. Online expenses obviously have a different path than a manually-submitted expense, but the authorization requirement still exists.

I'd say that if a Bishop or org president feels like they're not controlling individual expenses appropriately, they can make the entire Bishopric (including clerks) aware. Then they can ensure the org president is aware of incoming expenses, and wait for their approval before processing the expense. I expect with some prodding, any "rogue" submitter will understand the importance of including their org president in the expense submission process.