Should a diocese who prints consolidation reports allow a parish to change account descriptions?
We do not recommend allowing a parish to change diocese accounts descriptions at the parish level. Rather, we recommend having the parish add sub-accounts in that section of the chart, to reflect these new accounts.
Allowing the parish to change the account description of Diocese Based Accounts will cause issues with:
- Historical Reporting: This may initially cause reporting issues for historical data which the ParishSOFT Professional Services Team could resolve for a fee (charged each time an account description is changed for each parish). In other words, if the parish changes a description, from Cafeteria Income to Script Income, all the history will remain for the original (Cafeteria) account. And if a report was printed for a prior time frame, when the account description was still Cafeteria Income, it will print on reports as though it were for Script (the current description of the account).
- Consolidation Reporting: The new descriptions will not create a new line item on consolidated reports (Roll-ups are based on Account Codes, not Descriptions), but the parish's description may print on the consolidated report as the header line for that account, (if the consolidated report is filtered in such a way so that the Parish with the new description for the account is the first parish on the report, the report will use the description that parish has for that account) thereby causing confusion to those reading the report. The more parishes who change the description, the higher the odds that a non-diocesan description will print.
If you have a large number of parishes who would like to change the description, additional accounts could instead be added at the diocese level for the parishes to pull in. That way you can control the roll-up by how you code the accounts and which names will appear on consolidated reports.
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