Coop Finances

[Tommy Trussell]

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Stella-Terra Clemens
<stellaterraclemens at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello.
> My name is Stella-Terra and I'm the finance coordinator for a small (~25
> member) housing cooperative.
...
> Every month on the 25th, the house charges each of it's members their rent
> fee.  I can't figure out how to model this.  Essentially this is a landlord
> tenant situation.  I want to be able to have one account per member (as
> income accounts, I guess) and then have an account that houses their debt
> (which I'm assuming is an asset) but then when they pay the house, it has to
> go into the checking account, so the debt keeps going up.  I'm confused
> about how to properly model this relationship.
...
>
> [Side request: is there a way to have the same amounts billed to the members
> every month?]

Here's a suggestion ... feel free to critique, as IANA (I am NOT an
accountant)... AND I just noticed Keith Bellairs response and his
"model" may suit your accountant better.

Create a Checks Received (asset) account (which you would use to post
all checks received by the organization), and a Rent (income?) account
with 25 subaccounts (one for each unit).

When you receive a check, that check would post into the Checks
Received account, and apply to the Rent subaccount for the particular
unit. If you receive other sorts of checks, those would post against
their appropriate income accounts.

Every month on the 25th, you would have an scheduled transaction that
would decrease each unit's Rent account by its particular rent, so at
any time you can run a report showing all the Rent subaccounts, which
should normally be zero, with any late rentals showing negative. Late
fees would be transfers that would bring that unit's account lower.

Every time you carry a batch of checks to the bank, each item would
transfer from the Checks Received account to the Bank account using a
(split) deposit transaction.

The scheduled transactions would provide the effect of automated
"billing," though unfortunately GnuCash itself wouldn't generate the
actual bill without some more effort. Unless you manage a lot of
deadbeats (oops sorry for the pejorative, what's a kinder term?) you
could just generate a generic set of bills using your favorite word
processor and write in (or edit) the few exceptions each month based
on your Rent report.