Yes. You can do the complete finances of a cohousing project in spreadsheets and shared folders in some cloud. Or with pen and paper.
But that takes a lot of time, is mainly monkey work, is error prone, is limited and probably not transparant.
Centeam tries to solve all these problems.
Centeam is an online platform where every member of your project gets access to the finances. It's everybody's responsibility to submit their own costs, with a receipt, invoice ...Then, the admins will check and perhaps correct what was submitted. After that, everybody can see what was paid, by whom, when, how much ...
All costs together with the receipts and other details are forever accessible for anybody in the project.
Other than fixed distribution keys like an investment key Centeam has the ability to generate keys based on the birthdays of all occupants. It also takes into account the presence of certain occupants (think about children of divorced parents).
Sometimes it's not possible to know in advanced how to split a cost. E.g. drinks in the common house.
For this problem Centeam uses 'jars'.
More complicated is possible too. One tally for the common washing machines ends up in three jars: electricity, water and washing machines.
That way you can save up in the jar. This is money you will later spend on and invest in new machines while you still make sure that the people who 'consume' pay their share, without doing difficult Excel-magic.
Another example of the use of a jar: buy stuff in bulk and organise a shop. Via the shop form everybody can put in the exact amount of what he or or she purchased. Except for filling the stock, there is not much extra work.
One of the key features of Centeam is to avoid manual bank transfers as much as possible. When you pay something for the group, this sets back your balance. When a neighbour buys something, this balances out your total sum, avoiding constant bank transfers.
By importing the payments from your online banking, it's easy to check if you paid all the costs that need to be paid.
The organisation of common meals tend to become more difficult than it should be. The meals module in Centeam allows for managing the subscriptions (adults vs children), for the different options (vegan, meat ...) of the meal you and your crew choose to prepare.
When you're done, add the costs and select for each which options the cost applied. Centeam will do the calculation for you.
Does your project have a guest room, big kitchen, inflatable boat ... that can be booked, Centeam can help you with that.
It's possible for a user to be linked to multiple units. This is probably of use for people who own more than one unit.
It's even possible to have multiple units across different cohousing projects.
This can also be interesting for different projects that belong to a general ACO. For this ACO an extra project can be registered in Centeam with all the users and units of the projects belonging to the ACO.
Centeam tries to give you the most interesting overview, but if you want to do some Excel magic yourself, most data can be exported as .xlsx files.
If you are still in the building fase of your project, Centeam can also generate overviews per month in PDF that you can take to your bank for getting the money of your loan.
When the newsletter module is enabled and the user has the checkbox 'newsletter' checked, a monthly newsletter will be send via e-mail containing:
On top of all this, you can search for costs, there is a birthday calendar, budget control, a distinction between owners and occupants, the interface is available in Dutch or English and you can choose your own currency ...
