Patronage

Tracking patronage distributions in CORE is an annual task rather than real-time reporting feature. The process involves:

• Calculating how much each member spent in the fiscal year
• Deducting cost of benefits (if any) used during the year to determine net patronage spending
• Deciding what total funds are available for distribution
• Deciding whether funds will be distributed as cash (or equivalent), retained as equity, or both.

This should not be construed as legal advice but rather a system that works for some existing co-ops. Refer to your own state's laws as needed. To get started, search for Patronage Menu or locate it in the Site Map. The listed entries are effectively in order although not all users will follow the entire sequence to printing checks.

1. Create working table

This first step gathers all member transaction data for the year. This step will take the longest from a number-crunching standpoint and is used solely to make subsequent steps quicker. Fill in the start and end dates of your fiscal year and then:

• Check all member types that should be included in patronage disbursement.
• Check any super departments whose sales that should be excluded when calculated patronage.

2. Calculate gross purchases

At this point you must indicate which fiscal year number is associated with this patronage. If your fiscal year matches the calendar year there will only be one option, but in all other cases you need to pick one of the two calendar years spanned by the fiscal year. For example, if your fiscal year runs from July 1, 2000 to June 30, 2001 the choices for fiscal year number will be 2000 or 2001. Once the year is selected, click calculate to detrmine gross purchases as well as discounts. Gross purchases is all items purchased during the year except items in the excluded super departments. This almost always includes super department zero which is normally used for non-inventory items such as equity payments. Discounts are percent discounts given to members as an attribute of their account - that is, discounts the member receives on every purchase.

3. Calculate rewards

Rewards are other discounts benefits received by members during the year. The most common entry here is IC when benefits such as member appreciation day are distributed via a physical or virtual in-store coupon.

4. Update net purchases

Net purchases is gross purchases minus discounts minus rewards. This step does not require any input or choices but should be re-run any time rewards, gross purchases, or discounts are recalculated.

5. Report of loaded info

Use this to view the per-account totals. Columns included in the report include:

• Active: PC (Preferred Customer)
• Gross Patronage: The total calculated patronage.
• Discounts
• Rewards
• Net Patronage = Gross - Discounts - Rewards
• Bad address: Is the account flagged as having a bad/incomplete address?

6. Adding a patronage allocation

At this point there are two potential paths:

• Option 1: allocate patronage outside of CORE
  • Use Report of loaded info to export information about purchases as a spreadsheet. Add columns to the spreadsheet indicating total patronage for each member, patronage distributed as cash, and patronage retained as equity. The total should equal the sum of cash and retained patronage. Next use Upload rebates to load the spreadsheet with patronage information back into CORE.
• Option 2: allocate patronage in CORE
  • Use Allocate patronage and enter the total dollar amount being distributed to all members as well as the percentage to be distributed as cash and percentage to be retained as equity (these should equal 100). CORE will pro-rate the distribution based on net purchases - for example, if a member's net purchase represent 1% of all member purchases, that member will receive 1% of the total distribution.

Print Checks

CORE can generate PDF images of checks. This is an optional step and definitely the most complicated at present. This requires:

• Pre-printed blank check paper with the check on the bottom third. The PDFs will include account, check, and routing numbers.
• The GiveUsMoney plugin enabled and partially configured. The plugin provides the check printing functionality and configuration must include the store's name and address, checking account and routing numbers, and a staring check number.
• A file named rebate_body.png that will fill the non-check portion each page.

PDFs are generated with 500 checks per file and the resulting files will be written to /tmp rather than sent directly to the user. An administrator will need to retrieve them.