Proposal - Financial Systems for Co-op Villages

By: Jim Costa      Email

12/10/25

A) The Problem:
 

How can each Village be responsible for multi $Million funds received
and safe guarded, insuring the granter/Lenders that the funds will be used
for the purposes intended?

 

B) Assumptions:

 

1) Each Village will be a separate private corporation(s)
    and free to decide to do as they choose.

​

2) Each Village may choose to make similar financial record keeping decisions

    so they can freely give and receive support with other Co-op villages.

​

C) The Suggested Plan:

​

1) Load Desktop Computers with free Software, including:

​

a) Ubuntu (Linux) Operating system.
    This will provide spreadsheet, word processing and other office programs.

​

b) Load GnuCash accounting free software. Don’t use the Cloud version.

​

c) Training for the above can be found on YouTube.

​

d) The Co-Op villages that do this can form a Users Group for cross-training and
    sharing of their own created spreadsheets.

​

2) Use Spreadsheets for Budget Creation.

​

a) Have a spreadsheet page for each Focus Group and one total Budget for the      Village.
    The Spreadsheet of each Focus Group will automatically roll into the
    Village sheet.

 

b) Have the Village deposit Monthly funds into each Focus Groups (FG) Bank          Accounts.
    This requires each FG to do their own accounting, Budget management,
    cash, and password protection for their own private GnuCash program.

c) Each month each FG can export their monthly financial information so the
    Village Accounting system can import it into their combined Financial       
    Spreadsheet.

 

d) This puts the accounting responsibility on each FG and the overall auditing
    responsibility can be done monthly by a trained team of Village Auditors
    who will audit the FG’s records. Auditors will represent all FG’s

e) All Budgets should Be Rolled Forward Monthly.
    This can be done by dropping the monthly Revenue and Expense numbers
    into these two spreadsheets:

 

1) Monthly Budget Analysis.

 

This is a four column Spreadsheet (SS) with the following locums in it:

     Actual       Budget       Variance       Variance %
            ( Whole Dollars Only )

 

The FG can then analyze large variances and audit and/or adjust future monthly Budget figures, if necessary.

The Goal is to predict accurately what will happen in the future
and learn what went wrong in your last prediction.

 

2) 12 Month Rolling Budget. (Whole Dollars only)

 

This is a 14 column SS with the 12 months, a Total and Total % column.

Past Month titles are in (black), future months titles are in (red).

Future months are corrected each month, if necessary, converting the
original budget into a Rolling Budget.

 

This makes the future year’s budget more honest and accurate, and altered for large projects upcoming, possible population growth, etc.

​

Back To Top