New accounting project for construction costs

This concerns @reef-building and @reef-finance.

We have started spending money on the construction of The Reef without a legal vehicle to do so – Coral is not yet incorporated. With hindsight, this was a mistake, because it makes financial transparency much harder. Instead of:

here, this accounting system contains all costs related to the construction

we have

this invoice came when we did not have a bank account, so we paid it with the ASBL instead, and that is recorded into this other accounting system over there, but since we did not have enough money in the ASBL we refinanced it, which was problematic since the group was not yet complete, and that meant that the early movers were bearing costs that should have been spread over the whole group, so now we need to introduce an ad hoc correction…

You get the idea. It is going to be painful to explain this stuff to newcomers without coming across as amateurs.

For now – and I am very aware this is a fig leaf – I created a new project in the Freeagent space of The Reef ASBL called Construction. I assigned to it the bills that have come to the ASBL, but should, by right, have gone to Coral instead. For now they are four, for a total of EUR 19,318. At least one more is coming.

For the future, we need better integration between Team Fin and and Team Build. There is a tendency of Build to approve or request invoices without checking if and when we have the money to pay them (see this and replies).

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Hey, let’s stick with the need here, and not turn it into a blame game? We’re not a professional company and everybody is doing there best, so I would just say that we need to work on better coordination between @reef-finance and @reef-building.

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Agreed, but are any future invoices not being handled by the Sosim/board of the Sosim? (don’t have a view on this in fact)
Can we do this together with your explanation on FreeAgent or better to have more team finance people involved and organise a seperate team finance - team building meeting?

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Ok, let me rephrase: the failure mode of our current way of working is one part of The Reef committing to a payment, and another part failing to deliver on it because the money or legal plumbing are not in place.

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