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I have a question about "closing out" 2010 donations. In the Wiki it states under the Budget:

"Make sure that you have closed out the previous financial year. Do not delay closing the financial year, nor attempt to adjust the system date to the previous year."

Is this still relevant in CUBS? If so what steps are necessary to close out the budget?

Link: https://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/Yea ... orrections

ericwest wrote:I have a question about "closing out" 2010 donations. In the Wiki it states under the Budget:

"Make sure that you have closed out the previous financial year. Do not delay closing the financial year, nor attempt to adjust the system date to the previous year."

Is this still relevant in CUBS? If so what steps are necessary to close out the budget?

This is indeed still relevant. There's not a lot of "closing" to do, but MLS will remove the old data and adjust beginning balances. In the US, with a record retention period of three years, that means that all 2007 data will be removed. Any categories or donors or payees that have were connected only to 2007 transactions but not any transactions after that will be removed.

But the steps are very simple -- there's only one step. The first time you login to MLS in 2011, a new Urgent Task will appear for "Close out the financial year". You follow that link and everything is done automatically. As the instructions say, don't delay the closing or try to avoid it.

Under CUBS, there may be additional steps you might want to do with the Budget category, depending on local decisions. All Budget balances carry forward into the new year. Some units want all their auxiliaries to start with a fresh budget each year; if that is the case, you would need to enter transfers from or to auxiliary Budget subcategories to bring their balances to 0. Then when the Q1 budget allocation arrives (in the first week of January), you would transfer appropriate amounts to each Budget subcategory.

I'd suggest a send/receive or two to transfer in any outstanding transactions from 2010 before closing it out. It may or may not make a difference.

Thanks for the quick responses. I was looking at the Wiki "Closing out the Current Financial Year" and noticed is says "Generates Tithing Status". I was under the impression that wards had until January 31, 2011 to submit the Annual Tithing Declaration Report. Does this mean that when the prior year is closed out that tithing declaration status can still be input by the wards until Jan. 31 or is it closed when wards do the first send and receive in 2011? This is my first year overseeing this at the stake level, thanks for any input.

https://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/Clo ... ncial_Year

ericwest wrote:Thanks for the quick responses. I was looking at the Wiki "Closing out the Current Financial Year" and noticed is says "Generates Tithing Status". I was under the impression that wards had until January 31, 2011 to submit the Annual Tithing Declaration Report. Does this mean that when the prior year is closed out that tithing declaration status can still be input by the wards until Jan. 31 or is it closed when wards do the first send and receive in 2011?

You can generate the tithing declaration list at any time; many wards generate the list in December. But if you haven't generated it prior to the year-end closing process, it will be generated then.

But regardless of when it was generated, you have until January 31 to fill in the tithing declarations and submit them. (Actually, you are technically able to submit the declarations after that, but you will be late if you do so -- sometimes this is required if corrections are made after January 31 that affect year 2010 donations.)

I did the year-end closing today (there was a pop-up message instructing me to do so everytime I tried to follow a finance-related link in MLS today). However, I noticed that after the close-out process that all of the categories in the ward budget were set to zero; none of the balances from 2010 were listed in the "Balance Forward" column on the Budget Allocation Report.

Sorry to hijack this thread if it is poor form to do so - most forums I follow like to keep related questions in the same thread to make it easier to for people to find answers...

Our Stake has a unit that did not receive the message to close out the year (at least not that the Finance Clerk saw). I figure there are a couple of possible scenarios:

1. The message came in, someone else saw the message and clicked the link and forgot (or at least forgot to let the Finance Clerk know)
2. The message never came for some reason


There's probably other possible reasons, but those are the two that come to mind. Is there a way for someone to validate in MLS that the Close Out occurred and if not, to manually initiate the close out? I read the Closing out the current financial year page, but there's nothing mentioned on how to proceed if it doesn't automatically happen.

Thanks,

Rich Finder

poody wrote:Sorry to hijack this thread if it is poor form to do so - most forums I follow like to keep related questions in the same thread to make it easier to for people to find answers...

First of all, welcome to the LDSTech forum!

I appreciate your desire to follow forum guidelines for thread content. In this case, I think your topic is relevant to this thread's discussion, so your post is a good addition.

poody wrote:Our Stake has a unit that did not receive the message to close out the year (at least not that the Finance Clerk saw). I figure there are a couple of possible scenarios:

1. The message came in, someone else saw the message and clicked the link and forgot (or at least forgot to let the Finance Clerk know)
2. The message never came for some reason

I've never heard of number 2, as long as the system date is correct. I really think it must be number 1. Closing out the year is very simple -- a new urgent task link shows up to "Close out the fiscal year." If someone clicks on that link, even if they're just curious to see what it looks like, the year will close. It takes less than a minute in most cases.

poody wrote:There's probably other possible reasons, but those are the two that come to mind. Is there a way for someone to validate in MLS that the Close Out occurred and if not, to manually initiate the close out? I read the Closing out the current financial year page, but there's nothing mentioned on how to proceed if it doesn't automatically happen.

It's simple enough to check:

1. The first thing to do is to check that the system date is correct, and that the computer is really in the year 2011. If the date is wrong, post a reply telling us what the system date is and we can give you some more advice.
2. If the date is in 2011 and the fiscal year has not been closed, any time you go to into any financial feature (to create a donation batch, for example), you will be told you need to close the year first. I'm assuming this unit already created a donation batch for last Sunday, so this probably isn't happening.
3. If you are in the US, the record retention period is 3 years (I'm guessing you are in the US). So the process of closing out the year would have just removed all 2007 records. You can go into View/Update Donations, change the date range from "Current Year" to "All", and look at the oldest donation batches. If the oldest ones are in 2008, then you can be sure the fiscal year was closed (assuming the unit has existed that long).

bakebread wrote:I noticed that after the close-out process that all of the categories in the ward budget were set to zero; none of the balances from 2010 were listed in the "Balance Forward" column on the Budget Allocation Report.

I too have noticed this issue, and am wondering if this is just something that was overlooked when closing out the year end, and will be corrected in an update later, or is there some way we can make last years budget amounts show up in the Balance Forward column?

I just found my answer in another thread. (See pots #17.) My next question is then, I just checked, and it appears that the income and expense report is not affected by using the View/Edit Budget. If I were to use that for putting the carryover budget from last year, can anyone think of potential negative effects for doing that?https://tech.lds.org/forum/showthread.php?6544-Annual-Budget/page2