How to move a cooperative society from spreadsheets to software
Moving off spreadsheets feels risky, because years of records are at stake. KoopManager loads a society's records from a single workbook, checks them before anything goes live, and has the Exco review and sign off first.
The problem: switching feels riskier than staying
Spreadsheets work while a society is small. As membership and loans grow, several people keep different copies, reconciliation is done by hand and corrections leave no trail. Yet switching feels risky: the register has duplicates, nobody agrees the opening balances, and loans are halfway through repayment.
Who feels it
- Officers worry that a move will carry errors across, and that they will be blamed if the numbers are wrong afterwards.
- Members worry that their savings and loans will not be right on the other side. Today they can see their balance only by asking an officer.
How KoopManager resolves it
KoopManager's team loads the society's members, loans, guarantees and history from one workbook, with a template that explains how to fill it in. The system checks the data, flags problems such as duplicates, and compares each member's records with the balance the society declared, so differences show before go-live.
Nothing reaches the live books until every Exco member has reviewed the figures and signed off. Each member then gets their own login and can see their own balance. A sensible safeguard is to run the old and new systems side by side for one contribution cycle before retiring the spreadsheet.
Related guides
- Cooperative loan guarantees explained
- How cooperative dividends work
- The financial reports every cooperative Exco needs
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