Electronic Donations - Current Status

[marianomarini]

The church bank accounts are different. There is no local unit bank account in for most units in the USA, at least not in the normal sense. Rather, the checks are drawn against a special account at Zions Bank. Each unit has a separate account number, but it's not an account that deposits are made to. Instead, deposits are made to special "deposit concentration" accounts at a few designated banks that the Church has made arrangements with.

So it's quite different from a simple business or personal bank account, where you make deposits to the same account that checks are written from.

It sound like the Italian system.
Church has an agreement with just one bank to manage all Italian accounts.
Each unit has its own account number but all donations flow into the global account but local fonds!
I'm not so deeply involved into financial matter (right now), but it seem to me quite like USA system!
Few weeks ago we were informed that electronic donations must be sent into GENERAL account, no more into local unit account.
Maybe it's just a matter of number (I don't know how many Italians use e-donation) but I think it will be not a big deal to parse e-bills (sent from the bank) by a program for separate each fond ammount.
Just a think.

[ammonfife]

I recently returned from living in Switzerland.
My first payment there raised eyebrows when I actually used a donation envelope with cash. Everything is done electronically there.

Here's a few details.
Checks as we know them do not exist in Switzerland, and most of Europe. They operate on a "push" system rather than a "pull" system for personal payments. This means if I want to pay you for something, you must give me your bank account information, or a pre-printed slip with your account information, and I can either transfer you money via online banking, or by giving cash to the post office or another bank which charges a fee and then electronically posts it to your account. You cannot simply write out a check to someone, it just doesn't exist.

When I use my online banking to pay tithing in Switzerland, I get no charge, and the ward gets no charge. However, if I pay with cash through a deposit slip, then the ward clerk must deposit the cash at a bank or post office and then the church must pay 1CHF for the transaction. (I would think this might be waived if it were deposited directly into the bank the church's account is in.) So the wards prefer you to pay electronically.

As far as entering it into MLS the Church's bank would send them a letter that had records of each transaction, who paid, how much, and if there was a memo. (the memo is where you indicated how much of the payment was Tithing, Fast Offerings, etc.) The financial clerk then had to key the information into MLS. There was probably the same amount of work for the clerk as there is in the USA, but it is nice to be able to send your donations at any time during the week when it's on your mind, and not have to worry about bringing the checkbook.

-abf

[robartsd]

The biggest hurdle in receiving funds electronically sounds like it is assigning the contribution back to the proper church unit and member. This gets a little complicated when you consider that some contributions do not go to the member's unit. I personally know of two such cases: contributing to a full time mission being served by someone in a different ward and making fast offering donations as a missionary (these are received by the unit the missionary is serving in). Having the member donating use their membership record number as an account number would make assigning the donation to the correct member a snap, but it would still be difficult to assign to the local church unit of a missionary one is supporting.

[pburt2006]

Boy, this is making the American method of collecting look kind of primitive! Right now, if someone uses their bank's automated system to pay us, we get a check that may not specify the donation categories, and I still have to write out a donation slip for each of those checks. It sounds like those other countries would not have young men collecting fast offerings, and the financial clerk job must be even easier than it is here for me. I have heard of big-money people using that electronic service here in America to avoid making their earnings known to locals. That is irrelevant in my ward, but the convenience would be appreciated by many.