Co-op accountancy

Few questions from our side, could someone tell me the technical difference between member and director?

From what I understand (IANAL etc.), this will depend on your legal structure.

If structured as a limited company with co-operative rules as Open Data Services is, then someone is made a Director by being appointed to that role, and registered as such with Companies House.

Rules can require that all members are directors (common in small co-ops), or may set out the process by which the members elect a board of directors to act on their behalf (common in larger organisations).

Pretty much agree with Tim on this - for shorthand, where all members are directors (as in my primary co-op, calverts.coop) in the UK we call them 'collective type'; where the members elect a board, 'democratic type'.

http://coopportunity.org.uk/about/co-op-team/ are Bristol-based and specialise in accounting and other business admin services for co-ops.

To contact people who are accounting practitioners for their own co-op, you could also pose this question in the Worker Co-operatives group on Loomio.

Excellent, thanks so much. It's tricky to find info online about this, your wisdom is well received.

We get Somerset Co-operatives Services to do our accounts and they are very affordable as far as accounting services go (£35/hr if I remember correctly)

I'll add that name to our little black book, just in case. Thanks.

Sorry - late to the thread (I don't check Loomio often enough).

If you are structured as a limited company underneath then directors have additional legal responsibility for the business:
https://www.gov.uk/running-a-limited-company/directors-responsibilities

What this means in practice is that you could get in a lot more trouble as a director than as a member (i.e. shareholder) if you do anything underhand.

Though in reality the main one to watch out for is trading while insolvent - i.e. selling goods or services that you know you probably won't deliver because you will go bust. At points over the 10 years of CWEB we've been pretty close to this line but managed to trade out of it, but while you are trading out of it you do run the risk of crossing the line - we have much more process in place nowadays to make sure we can't even go near the line!

Co-ops UK have handily put together the attached list of co-op friendly accountants (got a bit confused for a moment because I thought I'd seen that posted here, but it was actually on the Community Shares practitioners list I saw it)