I have just joined. I am Treasurer and Membership Secretary for a society. In our case, it is the Johnson Society of London. We are a collection of people with a specific interest. The committee that runs it is comprised entirely of volunteers.
We have an annual membership fee and bank account. We run a web site (www.johnsonsocietyoflondon.org) which costs money. We publish a journal and so have to pay printers. We have monthly meetings and so have to pay the places in which we meet.
Our “business`” therefor is like a lot of small friendly societies. We could just as well be a gardening club. But we have a need to manage our finances, pay our bills on time and get our subscriptions paid on time.
I am struck by how little support there is for our type of organisation. On Quckfile I have set us up as a Sole Trader. We are not a Charity. Banks don’t have a customer category for us. Yet there must be thousands or tens of thousands groupings like us up and down the land.
It will be interesting to see how we manage on Quickfile.
As an unincorporated society you would pay corporation tax so the limited company classification in QF would give the best set of nominals.
Actually I set our unincorporated society up as a sole trader and found that it doesn’t make much difference apart from not gving you a director’s loan account which I have found no need for anyway.
I would add that you might want to create some custom nominals to separate your various income and expenditure streams. For our magazine I separate income from magazine sales and advertising sales.
The chairman of our society (who is a corporate lawyer) tells me we have a legal status and are designated as am unincorporated association. (A new one on me!)