A software community interest company set up by the BeatBullying Group in 2012 is almost a year late filing its first set of accounts.
BeatBullying announced on Monday that it will call in administrators after running into “significant financial difficulties”.
We Are Cosmo was set up in January 2012 after the Cabinet Office awarded BeatBullying £1.3m from the Social Action Fund to scale up its operations and tackle more social issues digitally.
BeatBullying’s 2012 accounts show that the charity was £302,000 in deficit on unrestricted funds, and say that a principal reason for this was an “overspend on technology related to Cosmo and associated development work.
However it said that this was a “strategically informed and a calculated risk based on the potential for Cosmo technology to become a strong source of unrestricted income for BeatBullying.”
“The overspend also reflects the difficulties in raising money for technological development in the third sector,” the annual report said.
Accounts also show that BeatBullying had for several years received an annual grant from the Department for Education and Skills, worth more than £400,000, but that this fell to £61,386 in 2012.
In the notes to the financial statements it said that the chief executive and trustees were “restructuring an number of departments and making a number of redundancies, while also agreeing payment plans with the majority of its significant creditors”.
We Are Cosmo set up to sell technology services
The press release at the time said: “Significantly, the Cabinet Office’s investment will also assist in the new organisation to take to commercial market ‘Cosmo’, the unique software framework which powers its existing proprietary counselling and mentoring services.”
The intention was for We Are Cosmo to continue to develop the technology behind BeatBullying’s online mentoring services and be able to sell this software to other organisations.
BeatBullying’s 2012 accounts show that it received £766,741 from Social Investment Business, which manages the Social Action Fund, and that this was spent on “scaling up BeatBullying’s digital social action framework, Cosmo, to increase the reach of established programmes Cybermentors, MiniMentors and FutureYou, and to support the development of All Together Better, and for the purpose of generating a specified number and type of volunteering and social action opportunities”.
We Are Cosmo was registered at Companies House in February 2012 and should have filed its first set of accounts in November 2013. Companies House began the process of removing We Are Cosmo from the register in February 2014 but discontinued that action a month later after receiving further information.
According to the latest annual return filed with Companies House, We Are Cosmo has four directors: Emma-Jane Cross, chief executive of the BB Group; Sarah Dyer, group director of digital at the BB Group; Sarah Long, chair of the BB Group, and Tim Waldron, vice-chair of the BB Group and civil society consultant.
Four of the company’s founding directors stepped down during 2013 and have not been replaced. They are: Sadie Westwood, who was director of brand and marketing at the BB Group until May 2014; Richard Piggin, who was deputy chief executive until July 2013; Annika Small, who is the chief executive of the Nominet Trust, and Charles Bosher, director of business development at the BB Group until October 2012.
