Retail Basics: Managing Key Indicators
By Wendy Fanigan
Audits & Reviews
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 [...]
Harrisonburg’s Friendly New Neighbor
By Ben Sandel 156 September - October - 2011 PDF download of article: pdf of article In March 2006, about 30 people came to a meeting at the Little Grill Collective restaurant in Harrisonburg, Va., to talk about starting a cooperative. The Little Grill had opened a 600-square-foot health food store (called The Little Store) in a rundown plaza on the poorer side of [...]
Commonly used CoCoFiSt terms
CoCoFiSt Common Cooperative Financial Statements, a CDS program for improving cooperative performance. CoCoBud A budgeting feature that, based on historical data, projects sales, margins, and payroll by department, as well as income statements, balance sheets, cash flows, ratios, capital budgets and loans for the next four quarters. A manager can then change assumptions to change the projections. CoCoGap This illustrates how much more profit [...]
Waking the Sleeping Giant: Recognize patronage dividends for what they are, co-op capital
By Marilyn Scholl, Joel Dahlgren, Bruce Mayer 148 May - June - 2010 Creating solutions begins with building the foundation for the future you want. One of the remarkable things about cooperation is that mutualism encourages solution-oriented growth, built on a vision of the common good. How profitability and capitalization are handled in cooperatives is an indicator of how much the co-op is actively [...]