Group accounting help

motorhomer14

Hello All, hope this is in the correct category.
I am helping on a social media group and we have decided to produce and see products starting with group stickers and then maybe cups, t-shirts.
I was first thinking of doing all this at cost price so no accounts should be needed, but now I was thinking with a very small profit 20p per sticker the profit would be used to buy more products (cups) to sell back to the group. If any profit was still there at the end of the year it will buy more products or go to an agreed charity.

With this in mind do I need to register anything. It will be a non-profit social group so I though would come under Unincorporated Association. I would post out by excel all money in by sticker sales and all products bought.

Would love some advice on anyone that has run a group

Savvy_Sue

I'm going to perhaps work backwards for you ... and from more formal setups than it sounds like this has started as. 

How are you handling the money at the moment? If you need a bank account (and if you are handling other people's money I'd say you do), then you will need a constitution / governing document / piece of paper which sets out who you are, what your purpose is, what you're doing and what 'officers' you have - doesn't need to be complicated or tie you in knots. You can find a link to a template for such a document here - that's from my local Voluntary Services organisation, you'd probably find similar (and a whole lot more besides) if you googled Volunteer plus your town / city / county. 

Alongside that piece of paper, you need the minutes of a meeting at which it was agreed that 'The Organisation' should open an account at XYZ bank, and that the signatories will be any two of the Chair, Treasurer, Secretary and a committee member. You'll have done your homework beforehand, and established that XYZ bank will take your business, and you'll have the forms you need at that meeting, ready to sign. You may not need to produce those minutes, but you'll be signing a bank application giving the date of that meeting. You don't have to have four signatories, but I'd strongly recommend always having two people agree any transaction - I'm sure you are perfectly trustworthy, I know I am, but that doesn't mean that my fellow committee members SHOULD just trust me. And having four signatories allows for people to go on holiday, be ill, and generally get on with Other Things In Their Life which may make them difficult to contact - but you could get by with three. 

Oh, and those people are likely to have to provide ID to the chosen bank, so as your officers, try to pick people with passports / photo driving licences, it will make life SO much simpler. 

And the bank is probably the only place you'll need to be 'registered', unless you grow into a registered charity, which is £5000 away and not necessarily appropriate. But again, that link I gave has some information about your options. 

It may well be that at present you're using someone's personal PayPal or eBay account, or some other form of e-wallet, or someone's personal bank account which (hopefully) is only used for that purpose. And that's fine, right up until the time when it isn't - either PayPal / eBay says you need a business account and closes your personal account, or something happens and what's in that 'personal-but-not-personal' account has to be scrutinised or declared for benefits or divorce purposes, or someone starts questioning the figures. 

So this probably sounds like overkill, but it's where I'd start. I'll admit I have only set up groups which were always going to need formality rather than 'just growed like Topsy', but we all have to start somewhere.