Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: A letter to share

[Fiona Frank (fionafrank]

we've been unbelievably lucky to have first one and now two qualified
accountants as members of our community.  And we have another accountant
who works on a contractual basis for us.  We operate as a company, and our
record keeping and accounting and annual reporting has always been
excellent.  Thanks for the reminder that it's not always like that!   So
suggestion: recruit an accountant to come and live with you (also a plumber
and an electrician have been very useful, sadly the electrician has moved
out, but only to a house more or less next door to our site).

On Mon, 8 Apr 2024 at 02:29, Shari Hirst <sharihirst13 [at] gmail.com> wrote:

> I am writing to the co-housing community to express my personal
> experience.  This letter is not coming from the Sand River Board.
>
> We were talked into trying a professional financial management company
> because it was explained to our community that they were less expensive and
> much more efficient and knowledgeable than we were.  That the most
> important responsibility of the Financial Committee’s was to keep accurate
> records and a new member was convinced that we weren’t.  She researched and
> recommended that we hire a particular business.  We were told that they had
> many services that we should use, but never did.
>
> It turned out that they were more expensive because they nickel and dimed
> us for everything.  A charge for putting a stamp on an envelope, the
> envelope, and such.  When we had questions about work they did, as we saw
> it, postings to wrong accounts, we never got a response.  In fact, once the
> resident who had recommended this business left Sand River, we couldn’t get
> a telephone number to contact them.  We would send emails, that were sent
> on and maybe months later we would get some kind of a response.  We had
> been assured that our price would only increase a certain percentage
> annually but that didn’t happen.
>
> It took two years to separate Sand River from this business because of
> their criteria that they had to be notified of severance before the
> contract renewed.  It took a year working with a bookkeeper to have our
> books back to the way they should be.  We are now a little over one year
> past our severance from the business we hired.
>
> I am writing to try to save other communities from the troubles we had.  A
> simple bookkeeper is proving to be the best for us, and less expensive.
> Feel free to contact me for further information
>
> Shari Hirst
> Sand River Co-housing
> Santa Fe, NM
> _________________________________________________________________
> Cohousing-L mailing list -- Unsubscribe, archives and other info at:
> http://L.cohousing.org/info
>
>
>
>