Tech Forum

Not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but prior to the CUBS conversion,
any check that had been printed was sent with the next transmission. Now
it's sent ONLY with a donation batch. While it is a good concept to only need
to print a financial report once a day, I'm worried no one has really
thought this thing through. (Even if it's fixed in 3.3, there should be
a general warning sent out.) Consider the following sequence of events:

-Sunday: tithing batch sent.

-Tuesday: Bishop interviews widow Jones and makes out a rent check to avoid
eviction. System doesn't bug him to transmit which wouldn't do anything anyway.
Swings by someone else's house for second signature.

-Tuesday night: Widow Jones gives check to landlord, thankful to avoid eviction.
Landlord takes check straight to ATM.

-Friday: check rejected as unauthorized. Then use your imagination.

-Next Sunday: Stake/general conference and no batch. (Even if batch, could
already be too late)

-Sunday after that: tithing batch sent, check authorization finally sent

It sure seems to me that MLS needs to transmit any printed check immediately.
I hope anyone who suggests a dummy donation batch to force transmissions
sees that unwarned units are unlikely to figure it out before bad things happen,
not to mention MLS will try to prevent an extra batch with this scenario.

As far as I am aware, any cheque (English, UK spelling), once entered into MLS can be transmitted straight away, without waiting for a donation batch.

Unless, of course, later versions of MLS or your recent CUBS transition prevent this.

Please correct me if this wrong.

We in the UK have yet to experience the joys of CUBS . From what I understand, it should make the financial side of the Ward accounts a lot easier. Once the dust has settled.

dkitchen wrote:Not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but prior to the CUBS conversion, any check that had been printed was sent with the next transmission. Now it's sent ONLY with a donation batch.

That's not at all my experience. I have written many checks since the CUBS conversion, and only created one donation batch (I'm at the stake level). Each group of checks has its own Expense Report. Each group of checks is transmitted on the next Send/Receive. Indeed, I have seen each check that was created and printed show up on the very next Finance Transmission Report.

So I don't see any problem in this area. The only minor change I've seen in this area is that as you are processing a donation batch, you can see the Expense Report for checks that you have written but not yet transmitted. But that's only an option for processing checks at the time of a donation batch -- it is definitely not the only way.

Thanks for raising the concern -- if MLS did allow expense transmission only with a donation batch, it might well cause the problems you hypothesized. But fortunately, none of that is a real problem because MLS continues to allow separate expense transmissions. I'm using MLS 3.2.4, by the way, just as it sounds that you are.

I seem to recall that MLS also gives a notification of untransmitted expenses if you try to log out. But it's possible I made that up.

As a matter of course, I always do a Send/Receive before logging out, just in case.

nutterb wrote:I seem to recall that MLS also gives a notification of untransmitted expenses if you try to log out. But it's possible I made that up.

As a matter of course, I always do a Send/Receive before logging out, just in case.

I saw that notification yesterday, but I found it odd since I had just done a send/receive. I saw it an hour later after another send/receive, but not after a third. I don't know why it didn't go the first time.

ryan jones wrote:I saw that notification yesterday, but I found it odd since I had just done a send/receive. I saw it an hour later after another send/receive, but not after a third. I don't know why it didn't go the first time.

I think there's a bit of a problem in this area. I got notified yesterday that I needed to transmit a check from two months ago. This is a check that was transmitted two months ago, and was not modified in any way in the last month or more. So the notification was quite odd. Fortunately, once I transmitted, the notification did not reappear.

Alan_Brown wrote:I got notified yesterday that I needed to transmit a check from two months ago. This is a check that was transmitted two months ago, and was not modified in any way in the last month or more.

At the stake level, I have not received any MLS alerts about untransmitted expenses. However, on the November Unit Finance Statement I had a notice I needed to use MLS or call in info on a check that had been processed for payment, but that CUBS apparently hadn’t known about (UFS is at the stake center, so I can’t provide the exact wording at the moment).

I checked (no pun intended) my hardcopy files and have a transmission report for the check in question, which was in a batch of several checks. The check also shows up as expected in other portions of the UFS. I didn’t have time when first reviewing the report to contact LUS, but I intend to. Since it seems somewhat related what Alan saw, I thought I’d post what I saw.