RE: money for meals
From: Rob Sandelin (robsanmicrosoft.com)
Date: Wed, 19 Oct 94 10:51 CDT
I could tell you this at lunch, but then nobody else would hear so:

Sharingwood
* charges a flat fee for meals
* Collects money monthly.  You mark off your name if you are not going 
to attend, otherwise you get billed for that meal. Weekly sign up 
sheets are kept by the mailboxes.
* Cooks buy some food and give receipts to treasurer for credit towards 
meal account
* Meals cost $2.00 per adult, $4.00 for non-cooking adult, $1.00 for 
kids. Guests are charged same as adults, although most the time we 
forget to ask.
* If someone only occasionally has a meal, and they do not cook in a 
rotation they pay more. If they do cook, they pay the regular price for 
any meal they eat.
* No we have one bank account for the whole association and meals are 
just added to your monthly assessments.  We have one person who is 
bookkeeper and keeps all the numbers straight.  She has set up a 
spreadsheet for each household and keeps a separate line item for 
dinner accounts and then just adds that total to the regular monthly 
assessment and bills us.
* We don't pay income tax that I am aware of, we just hired an 
accountant who reviewed our books and filed our taxes for us.  I don't 
believe we had to pay any money, we just filed the papers. I recommend 
using an accountant to do your association tax filing, we didn't and 
made some mistakes and had to pay some penalties (we are appealing these).
* we buy food together in bulk from a wholesaler once a month.  
Everyone can get in on this order and we often buy big quantities of 
things (like flour, rice, toilet paper, etc.) and save big over retail. 
 They even deliver our order right to us.  (Nutrasource)
* We don't pay sales tax on meals. Paying sales tax on community dinner 
is not acceptable.

* We have probably re-invented community dinner more than anything else 
we do. We try out a system and if it doesn't work,we just try something 
else.  I heard from the folks at Nyland that they started off using a 
token system for meals but they found that keeping track of tokens was 
too much work.  We are lucky that we have several service minded people 
who volunteer for big jobs like bookkeeping. I imagine if we didn't 
have such a dedicated bookkeeper we would have to use some other system.

Rob Sandelin
Sharingwood

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