Setting up Christmas Savings club

Barneysmom

It's a brilliant idea, I wish we could do it in our area, we've just lost our local butcher, and do miss him loads.
But I love the idea of a Christmas club for meat, I'm now having to buy the Morrisons stamps as we now have no local butcher.

I hope you can go ahead with it, I'm sure it will be very popular, good luck! :cool:

Owain_Moneysaver

Just make sure that all the money is in a separate bank account - you don't want to turn into another Farepak!

quickstepqueen

Owain_Moneysaver wrote: »

Just make sure that all the money is in a separate bank account - you don't want to turn into another Farepak!

My boss mentioned Farepak this morning. Customers might be wary of a savings club following the farepak debacle, so we need to do this right to give our customers the confidence to use the scheme.

I've now given my boss all your ideas and information and he's very very grateful. I think he's going to contact the FSB first to see if they can offer help on the legal/small print side of things. It's a shame that we have to be so careful of scammers etc, it makes it such hard work but we need to safeguard both us and our genuine customers.

Thankyou all again.
PS. Barneysmum ...It's a shame that you have no local butchers. There are (including ourselves) 12 independent butchers within a maximum 10 mile radius of the main town! We are very lucky.

quickstepqueen

Just wanted to update you on my progress as you were all so kind in offering advice.

I rang the FSB who called me back within the hour. The chap I spoke to didn't know much about Christmas Savings Clubs. He suggested we ideally keep the money in a seperate bank account. However upon further research I found that it wasn't a legal requirement for us.

After the Farepak scandal there is now a Christmas prepayment association who have set up a code of practice and larger schemes such as hampers and financial institutes offering Christmas Savings schemes have to have a seperate account. As a butchers we are classed as an informal scheme and therefore it isn't a legal requirement.

All he did advise was that we made sure we had our terms and condition completely upfront and that we held a record of all transactions and that a customer also had a record.

With this in mind (and with the advice from paulwf) I have devised a simple spreadsheet - one per customer. Each sheet has a unique card number, room for customer contact details and then columns for date, amount paid, total amount paid to date and room for the name of the shop assistant taking that transaction. Unfortunately we don't have a computer at work so our set-up has had to be a bit old fashioned but workable.

For the customer I've devised a small card that we can record the transaction with the amounts paid, so they can see at a glance what they have saved to date, and we have purchased a customised stamp so we can stamp the card. This way, we, and the customer have a record of those transactions.

I'm still working on the terms and conditions but we've decided that they can't spend their card until a set date nearer the end of the year. Also, if they don't spend all they've saved they can carry the money over into the following year or have the remainder in the form of our gift vouchers. The FSB did say that we don't want to be treated as a bank account but as for money laundering regulations we weren't to be concerned with those because of the small amounts of money that would be paid in.

My biggest concern was about having money that a customer paid but then never redeemed. It seemed from the FSB that as long as we set fair terms and conditions we could choose what we wanted to do.

I think in our T's & C's we shall say that if they haven't redeemed their card during the set period (Nov 10 - early Jan 11) we will make reasonable efforts to contact the customer to see how they want to proceed. If they haven't contacted us by a set date (say end March 2011) they will forfeit their savings and they will be given to charity/put in the staff tip box LOL.

As long as we are upfront with the customers. We don't want to rip anyone off. We want to be clear and totally transparent and if a customer really really wanted their money back (perhaps they were now moving out of the area) I think the bosses would bend the rules.

Thankyou all again for your help. If anyone at a later date reads this thread hoping to set something similar up then please PM me and I'll be happy to update you, let you know how it's going/any problems.

Think we'll learn as we go along but you've all been brilliant...but then MSE'rs are

quickstepqueen

Now got a grand total of 5 people signed up to the Savings club....5 more than I ever thought, so a result in my books!!

Thanks for all the advice. Couldn't have done it without you

jackomdj

I think the great thing will be that as people come in to save they will buy something, which will help if they only used to buy at Xmas time. It may be worth putting it in a local advert talking about fresh free range turkey....think you can't afford it, think again with our savings club...

We spend a lot on our turkey, but I think once you have tasted the real thing you don't go back!

quickstepqueen

We now have 17 members in our savings club. It's much more popular than we imagined (especially as we are a small independent business.) Some add something each week, some add randomly...and to think I was so pessimistic at the start. I've advertised on our website and we have flyers and posters in the shop window so am feeling rather proud that it's working so far. The test will probably be at Christmas when everyone wants to redeem their cards!

With the power of the internet and the kindness of MSE'rs we have set something new up which we knew nothing about but which we are proud of. Thankyou.

Premier_2

I'm amazed. :eek:

Hopefully real moneysavingexperts will not have forgotten Farepak and will now be ensuring their future savings for Christmas are in a fully protected scheme, such as a UK savings bank where hopefully they'll be earning a bit of interest to boot

Savvy_Sue

I know where you are coming from, but some people will also want to support local businesses, which is what this aims to do.

Owain_Moneysaver

How about a free raffle ticket for everyone who signs up and deposits at least £10 by end of Sept (existing members included)? Should help bring in some more people to the club and obviously the cost of the prize (voucher to spend in shop) is only the wholesale cost to you.

Send a photo to the local paper of Mrs X opening her membership. (Obviously Mrs X should be a sweet old lady with a photogenic grandchild) and remember to mention 'all club funds held in separate bank account' etc.