As with many of my posts here, this was inspired by a conversation about partial withdrawals. In this case, a few conversations actually, regarding the idea or attempt to lower a member's percent of ownership in the club. I suspect that unless they have very strict controls, most clubs have run into a situation where one or two members have a majority share in the club. From my experience in my own club, and in talking to members over the years, there seem to be two common reasons for this:

• One or two long time members leave, and when their place is taken by a few new members, the club notices that the most long-term members suddenly have a very large percent ownership.
• One or two members have made larger than normal monthly payments for long enough that their percent ownership gets to be far ahead of the rest of the club.

Regardless of the reason, most clubs that I have spoken with will do one of two things:

• Ask the members in question to lower their monthly input until some of the other members catch up
• Ask the members in question to take a partial withdrawal, in order to lower their percent of ownership.

As far as book-keeping goes, the first option is certainly the easiest to keep track of; the member(s) in question simply make lower payments until the member status report shows their percent of ownership go down to an agreeable level.

Depending on the club's fortunes, this can take a while, though. If the club (and by extension it's members) are in a bit of a hurry, then a partial withdrawal can quickly bring the level of ownership down. The trick though, is in determining how much money to give as part of the partial withdrawal, and what the percent of ownership will be after the partial withdrawal is completed. If the percent of ownership changed for each member independent of every other member, this would be pretty easy. The way the accounting system is set up though, any adjustments to one member's percent of ownership will automatically adjust the percent of ownership for everyone.

So over the last few days this week I've been working on a spreadsheet where I could calculate the current percent of ownership for several members in a club based on entering their Current Value, then enter a dollar value for that member, and have the spreadsheet show an updated percent of ownership for all the members based on that dollar value.

I am attaching the result of my time to this post. The dollar values are made up, just to have something to fill in. Unless I've done my math incorrectly, it's perfectly fine to change some of the values in Column B to Zero. I only went out to two decimal places on the spreadsheet, so I don't suggest that this be used as anything other than an estimation tool. Also, this isn't connected to the online accounting, and it doesn't take into account other transactions that you might have entered in the course of doing your regular book-keeping, which might have changed the value of the club. Again, this is purely an estimation tool, to give a rough idea of how much money a member might need to take out if they want to reach a certain percent of ownership, and how that will effect the percent ownership of the other members.

I should also mention that if anyone more versed in Excel wants to make improvements, changes, additions, etc. feel free to do so.