The basics

CiviShares provides community shares specific functionality, relying on CiviCRM to provide more generic CRM functionality.

Here's a walk through of an organisation might use CiviShares that should get you familiar with some of the basic terminology. If you have experience with community shares, this process should be reasonably familiar to you.

The first thing that you will do is create a Society that offers shares. To do this create a new Organisation and ensure that is has the Society contact type. Many organisations will only need a single Society but you can create and manage multiple Societies in a single CiviShares site.

You will then create a share or bond Issue for the society. An Issue represents an opportunity for people to invest in your society. A Society can have multiple Issues.

Once you have created an Issue, you will invite people to invest in the Issue. Each time someone invests in an issue, CiviShares will create a Holding and record a Purchase transaction in that holding and a Share certificate will be issued.

Investors in and Issue typically receive Interest and a Capital repayments on a regular basis according to the terms of the issue. In CiviShares we use Accounting Periods to track these payments. Accounting Periods are typically one year in duration. Each Accounting Period pays interest at a set rate, and repays a set amount of capital (both of these may be 0 for a particular period). Each investor will receive a Statement after the end of each Accounting Period that summarises their holding and and transactions.

From time to time Investors will ask to Withdraw or Transfer their capital. In each case an appropriate Transaction is created.

All Transactions are recorded via a Double entry book-keeping. A transaction consists of one or more Entries that move money between different Accounts in an Issue.