Overview

Currently the AGRIS Patronage module involves steps that prove difficult in determining customer/patrons’ current business status with the cooperative.  The following demonstrate the need for fast, efficient reporting of each account’s current status:

• Cooperatives require their Equity records reflect voting rights, patronage, and stock ownership as per their By-Laws. 

• If a member has voting rights they must be common stock holders. 

• In most Cooperatives the By-Laws provide that IF you are not an agricultural producer or have not patronized the Cooperative then your voting rights are waived and your stock is transferred to, in most cases, a Certificate of Participation or C of P. 

• Some Cooperatives allow that stock investments be held out of earnings so there can be a period of time before stock balances are fully funded.

• Name Address Description Code flags are entered to allow reporting of Voting, Patronage, Producer, etc.

• This process is increasingly difficult as Cooperatives gain in size and numbers of      patrons.  

• This information in Name Address should be tied to the Patronage system, possibly with an advanced report.  If a common stock gets transferred to a C of P or from a C of P to a common stock then the flag on Name and Address needs to change showing that they have voting rights or are non-voters.

Solution

• User defined Code Description fields in Name and Address currently allow definition of single digit flags that provide for processing and reporting on various status of customer/patrons.  Cooperatives may choose to indicate patronage eligibility and voting status with the flags.  Each year, if the organization has by-laws that govern the ability to vote or not vote based on their purchase/sales activity for that year, the cooperative must manually update the name and address voting flag.  A standard advanced stock equity report has been added to the Patronage system (Voting Flag Export/Import with Activity) that has Name Address Description Codes available with customer/patron activity and more that can be printed to analyze and establish voting members for that year.

• The standard contract export provides the new “Primary Schedule Number” and “Options Quantity” as new export fields.

• The contract web services extract provides the new “Primary Schedule Number” and “Options Quantity” as new attributes.

NAME/ADDRESS CODE DESCRIPTIONS 

Navigation: NAM, Setup Information, Code Descriptions

Name/Address Code Descriptions (sample descriptions)

Open

The current setup of Miscellaneous Fields will reflect as Range Selection Criteria along with Name ID Type in the “Voting Flag Export/Import with Activity” report.

VOTING FLAG EXPORT/IMPORT WITH ACTIVITY Report

Navigation: PAT > Report Manager > Advanced Reports > Standard Reports > Voting Flag Export/Import with Activity

Voting Flag Export/Import with Activity selection criteria

This report creates an export CSV file in the format of the Name/Address import, with additional columns included for Patronage stock balances and purchase/sales activity.   The purpose of the report is to be able to view and edit the “Name/Address flags” in Excel.   The Patronage information is provided in order to have the information necessary to set the flags properly.

Once the editing is complete in Excel, then the same CSV file can be re-imported to update the flags in the Name/Address System.

The Name Id Type, as well as the 6 Name/Address Name ID code fields, can be used as filter criteria on the report.

Open

Voting Flag Export/Import with Activity selection criteria - (Code Descriptions are examples)

The Voting Flag can also be used as selection criteria.  You might want to create an export of every customer who is currently set with No Voting rights, to see if any of them should be changed to “Y”.  Then, create another file to include everyone who does have voting rights, to determine if any of them should be set to “N”.

Open

The Patronage Flag can also be available as a Range Selection, along with the rest of the code description fields.

Open

Voting Flag Export/Import with Activity – categories to include in report columns

The output file will show additional columns for the product sales that have been invoiced in the time period specified.  The multiple Beginning and Ending Product Category codes included on this screen does not limit the number of customers included on the report.  The ranges specified here allows you to group multiple categories together into 10 different columns in Excel.

Open

Examples:

The first column could be your range of Product Categories for Fertilizers.

The second column could be your range of Product Categories for Chemicals.

The second column could be your range of Product Categories for Tires/Batteries.

etc.

Resulting CSV report in Excel.   What can I do with the results?

As mentioned, the output file is created in the format of a Name/Address import, with the ability to modify the misc. Name/Address 1-character fields.  There will be many blank columns for all of the other Name/Address data elements that we will not be re-importing.  The example below shows the output in Excel after columns D to AB have been hidden, and columns AE to BG have also been hidden.

Open

The stock balances can be viewed in columns BI to BM. 

The total Purchase/Sales activity for the time period can be viewed in the column Total Activity.

The total grain purchases that were settled in this same time period can be viewed in the column GRN Purchases.

The invoice sales are separated out by the 10 groups of product categories in columns BP to BY.

All of these columns, along with the Federal ID, gives you the information you need to determine whether this customer should be included in Patronage allocations, and whether they should have voting rights.

Manually update columns AC and AD in Excel, save the file, and then re-import the changes back into the Name/Address System.