Problem With Carry Forward of Next Year's Budget

[Matt]

After I ran the year end close, I found out that the sum of the budget amounts for each fund for 2004 had changed vs. what I had loaded in as "next year's budget" for 2004 prior to doing the close. Fortunately I had printed out the Monthly Budget Amounts report before I did the close. When I compared the before and after closeout Monthly Budget Amounts reports for 2004 I found that for accounts where we had an amount budgeted for 2003 but nothing budgeted for 2004 the budget amount for 2003 erroneously transferred to 2004 when we did the closeout. However, for accounts where there was an amount budgeted for both 2003 and 2004 the budgeted amount for 2004 transferred correctly.

Did anyone else experience this problem when doing the year end close? If so, request that Powerchurch research the cause of this problem and include the correction in the next Maintenance Release.

[Zeb]

I believe the intention there is that the next years budget is more or less for if you budget is changing next year, if its not then the budget will be the same so it carries over.

[mkanz]

I too experienced a problem when transferring my budget information. My problem wasn't exactly the same as yours, but I do believe there is a problem with the software. My problem was the distribution of the budget amount over the 12 month period. For example a $10,000 budget figure was distributed as $5000 in January and then the rest over the next eleven months. I had to go in and manually enter all the figures. I did contact tech support because I believe there is a problem with the software. Their reply was that I probably did something wrong. I will again notify them and ask that they correct this in the next maintenance upgrade.

[Jeff]

If you are changing the budget of an account that already has budget shown, PowerChurch will split the budget in proportion to the current budget. In other words, mkanz said his budget was 10,000 with the first 5,000 budgeted in January. If I understood correctly his budget would look like this:

Code: Select all

January 5,000
February  455
March     455
April     455
May       455
June      455
July      455
August    455
September 454
October   454
November  454
December  454

If you change the yearly budget from 10,000 to 15,000, a 5,000 increase, PowerChurch will change the budget as follows:

Code: Select all

January 7,500
February  683
March     683
April     683
May       683
June      683
July      683
August    683
September 681
October   681
November  681
December  678

The reason January went from 5,000 to 7,500 is because it was 50% of the original budget so it was allocated 50% of the increase in the budget. December was changed to 678 because PowerChurch it was allocated whatever was left after other months were changed proportionally.

PowerChurch works this way because we are trying to allocate changes in the budget based on what you have already setup. If you want the new budget to be split evenly accross all 12 months, do the following. Before you put in the next year's budget type a 0 in the yearly budget field, this will zero out the current budget in all the months. Then when you enter the budget for the next year, it will be evenly divided over all 12 months.