What is AirRegister?

Background

Nearly 500 organisations have issued community shares (withdrawable shares) totalling over £150m to over 100,000 people in the UK. Many of these organisations have hundreds of members with respective investments in their organisation, which they have to manage via a “register” on an ongoing basis in line with the terms and conditions that they set out in their share offers - from crediting interest to managing withdrawals.

However to date, there has been a lack of dedicated online tools to help societies manage their registry. Groups have been left to use Excel or even pen and paper to manage their share registers, which has led to difficulties in keeping accurate and clear records.

To address this issue, Co-operatives UK has supported a group of leading community shares practitioners to develop an open tool that can be used by societies of any size. The starting point has been to try and capitalise on the existing cloud-based database systems already being used extensively for similar purposes by SMEs, charities and other non-profits. The team has developed an early-stage, open and free share register tool on the popular cloud platform Airtable.

We released a beta version (AirRegister v1.1) in July 2021 and after a pilot phase of testing the template with a handful of societies, we have now launched AirRegister v2, which we anticipate to be the final template.