Reconciliation

[aebrown]

Do you mean the past reconciliations no longer appeared balanced?
example: You reconciled in October, then in November, and when you go back to October the reconciliation is no longer without unreconciled differences?

If so, that is a known and very annoying bug. MLS doesn't seem to keep snapshots from month to month.

I suppose you could call it a bug, but it is clearly the way MLS is designed. I don't like it either. The fundamental problem is that corrections to transactions are dated with the same date as the original transactions, not today's date.

So if I have successfully reconciled October, then I make a correction to an October transaction (void a check, cancel a donation, adjust a category on a check or donation, etc.), then my October reconciliation will be affected. This is a natural result of the fact that the transfer or other correction transaction will be dated in October.

Of course the problem is even worse if you are making adjustments to February, or -- heaven forbid -- a transaction in 2006. Your whole chain of reconciliations from that date forward is then broken. That doesn't necessarily mean you have to go back and redo all those reconciliations, but if you are out of balance, you may have to do all those reconciliations to track down the problem. And those reconciliations no longer correspond to the Church Unit Financial Statements, so you really are in a hole with no good solution.

I commented on this topic on a previous post on another thread at http://tech.lds.org/forum/showpost.php? ... ostcount=3

[Jimmer-p40]

Here is the way that HQ told me to fix the issue, if you make a catagory adjustment in a prior month (reguardles of the year) you need to make a "Temporary adjustment" in the reconciliation for the month that the origional deposit or expanse was made. Then you will clear the temporary adjustment in the month that you see the change reflected on the Church unit financial statement. So lets say that today, Sister Smith comes in and says that the donation that she made in november was supposed to be in fast offerings not tithing. You would go to the november deposit batch, find her donation and change the catagory of her donation. Then you would go to Reconcile and chose the month of November, click on Temporary Adjustments, add an adjustment. (Opposite of what ever the amount of the unreconciled differences on the report page) Then, since you made the adjustment in January (physically) you will need to wait until the January statement to see the change at HQ and clear the adjustment.

That should be about as clear as mud

[SmithGW]

At this point the lesson cannot be downloaded. It is only available at lds.org.

[LMJennings-p40]

Here is the way that HQ told me to fix the issue, if you make a catagory adjustment in a prior month (reguardles of the year) you need to make a "Temporary adjustment" in the reconciliation for the month that the origional deposit or expanse was made. Then you will clear the temporary adjustment in the month that you see the change reflected on the Church unit financial statement. So lets say that today, Sister Smith comes in and says that the donation that she made in november was supposed to be in fast offerings not tithing. You would go to the november deposit batch, find her donation and change the catagory of her donation. Then you would go to Reconcile and chose the month of November, click on Temporary Adjustments, add an adjustment. (Opposite of what ever the amount of the unreconciled differences on the report page) Then, since you made the adjustment in January (physically) you will need to wait until the January statement to see the change at HQ and clear the adjustment.

That should be about as clear as mud

Thanks to everyone for all of your help! This turns out to have been the problem. I changed some categories a few of months ago, and used the Temporary Adjustment to reconcile. Then when the adjustments came thru, I didn't that there would be transfer entries that had to be cleared manually. Even more interesting is that not all of the transfer effected the reconciliation balance! (I found which ones I needed by trial and error, but eventually processed all of the manual ones.)

The moral is to make sure the expense is ONLY entered into the correct category in first place!

Thanks again!

[AdrianLP-p40]

I suppose you could call it a bug, but it is clearly the way MLS is designed.

Being a software developer myself, it smells suspiciously like an oversight

Whereas not quite as bug-like as say a NULL pointer exception, or infinite recurion, I'll still personally call it a bug.

[AdrianLP-p40]

At this point the lesson cannot be downloaded. It is only available at lds.org.

Lesson? Like: http://www.lds.org/mls/training/ClerkTr ... nstallers/ ?

[aebrown]

[INDENT]Originally Posted by smithgw [/INDENT]

[INDENT]At this point the lesson cannot be downloaded. It is only available at lds.org.[/INDENT]
Lesson? Like: http://www.lds.org/mls/training/ClerkTr ... nstallers/ ?

There is a lesson on reconciliation that can be downloaded (using the URL AdrianLP mentioned). The problem with that particular lesson is that it is out of date -- it describes MLS 2.6 or earlier. Thus it will be a bit confusing to users of MLS 2.7 or later. The point of confusion is that prior to version 2.7, most changes to donation categories or canceling of donations, or changing check categories had to be called into the Church for them to show up on the Church Unit Financial Statement. Now with MLS 2.7, such corrections are automatically transmitted with the next Send/Receive.

The online lesson (at lds.org under Serving in the Church | Melchizedek Priesthood | Record Keeping and Auditing Training) has been corrected to reflect how MLS 2.7 works, but the downloadable versions still describe MLS 2.6.

When I asked Clerk Support about getting the download updated, their reply was: "Currently the updated Reconciliation course is available for viewing on www.lds.org (http://www.lds.org/pa/display/0,17884,6074-1,00.html) but it has not been incorporated into the downloadable bundle. Look for that sometime this summer." Why it would take so long, I don't comprehend, but that's what they said.

[childsdj]

The issues around taking so long are many including language support, translation, correlation, rerecording the audio portions to reflect the changes, etc.. This is going to be the problem in all lessons. I know that the group that helps with the lessons are pushing it as fast as they can.

[aebrown]

The issues around taking so long are many including language support, translation, correlation, rerecording the audio portions to reflect the changes, etc.. This is going to be the problem in all lessons. I know that the group that helps with the lessons are pushing it as fast as they can.

I understand very well the issues involved in incorporating the lesson changes into all the various language versions of the training, and that could easily take months. However, given that there is already an English version of the updated lesson posted at lds.org, it can't take more than a few hours of work to incorporate that into the English download. That is what I was referring to when I stated that I couldn't comprehend why it would take until the summer, not anything related to other languages.

However, I certainly understand if the Church has a practice of releasing the training for all supported languages at the same time. In that case, it is clear that it will take some time to incorporate the change into all the downloads.

I hope I didn't sound critical of the people who create these lessons. I am a huge fan of the record keeping training lessons, and I promote them within my stake every chance I get. I'm impressed not only with the individual lessons, but with the fact that they have been made available in so many languages. That's a Herculean task, and I'm sure a great blessing to clerks and leaders around the world.

[childsdj]

I know it was not meant as critical. I appreciate the feedback. The main problems with reconciliations are really only in domestic units, English speaking only. That is because there is a different back end system for domestic units and it does not auto reconcile accounts. Thus, we try to band aid the process with various approaches, including lessons, tips, MLS messages, etc. We also have changed the MLS program itself to help until the back end system is rewritten to auto reconcile.

I will see if we can't get this lesson out earlier.