Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Common meals

[Muriel Kranowski (murielk]

Everybody does it differently :) Don't know if that is "sad but true," but
at any rate it seems to be true. We started charging $4.50/adults, kids
half price, little kids free. We told the cooks they could spend $4 of the
4.50, leaving the extra 50 cents to cover staples.

After some time at that price, cooks were complaining that they couldn't
buy high-quality food (local, organic) for $4/person, so we bumped it up to
$5.50 (cooks can spend $5). We now have a big surplus so we probably need
to back up 50 cents.

Also, the head cook eats that meal for free and the two co-cooks get half
off on their meal, so when you compute your allowed budget you have to
subtract $11. This can really tighten up the budget if relatively few
people signed up for that meal, and sometimes cooks forget to allow for
that and go a little over budget. It isn't an exact science.

We have a Meals Accountant (a workshare position). The head cook gives him
the meal sign-up sheet and he puts that info into a spreadsheet and does
monthly billing. The head cook also gives the Meals Accountant their
receipts and asks either to be directly reimbursed or to have their own
meals account credited for what they spent.

On Tue, Apr 12, 2016 at 8:03 PM, Rita Bullinger <ritabullinger [at] gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> Can anyone anywhere offer ideas for organizing the pricing and
> record-keeping of common meals?
> We are about to have a common house!! I welcome any ideas!
>
> Thanks so much.
>
> Rita Bullinger
> Germantown Commons, Nashville
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