By Thane Joyal, Mark Goehring 173 July - August 2014 Loss prevention is a key piece of the retail grocery business. Co-op managers are aware of this at their level and manage against it every day, but everyone in the cooperative needs to pay attention to the possibility. Board members: don’t be complacent. There are myriad ways to steal from a grocery store: at the [...]
An essential part of a co-op board’s fiduciary duty is the annual external monitoring of their co-op’s finances and financial systems. This Field Guide introduces a process for making important board-level decisions about the two standard types of external monitoring: audits and reviews. Choosing audits or reviews An audit of financial statements is a thorough examination of the cooperative’s financial statements, allowing the auditor [...]
