What happens if Parish Online goes bust?!

What happens if Parish Online goes bust?!

We'll try not to be offended that you've asked that question! But it's right that you do as your council needs to know that the suppliers you use are resilient and have plans should the worst happen.

Short Answer

The short answer is:
  1. You'll be given notice that the company is winding up. The exact amount of notice will be in our latest Terms and Conditions. It's currently 12 month.
  2. During that period you'll be informed if any of our services are being migrated to another company or if they'll be closed down at the same time as the company.
  3. Services will remain active until the end of your contract period or on the closing down date, whatever comes first. This gives you an opportunity to export any information you need from our services.

Resilience

The way we operate our company means that the likelihood of us having to close down the company are very slim (famous last words, I know). Here are some points to show how we operate:
  1. We take up-front annual subscriptions for our services, which means we typically have a large cash reserve that covers operations for the duration of your contract. In reality, our reserves cover 150% of your subscription term.
  2. We are a Community Interest Company (Local Authority Technology CIC) which limits the profits we can make. This ensures Directors cannot extract disproportionate amounts of money from the company and compromise its stability.
  3. Community Interest Companies typically have no shareholders or shares, making it near impossible to sell on (just in case the Directors get tempted by an offer).
  4. We have a sister company, Geoxphere Ltd, where we sell our services commercially. Having the two companies operate side-by-side gives extra resilience as they have shared Directors and therefore a strong intent to keep both solvent.

    • Related Articles

    • Transfer a gov.uk domain to Parish Online

      Overview You will need to transfer the management of your gov.uk domain name over to Parish Online if you have our Website, Email or Domain service. Method Contact your current Domain Registrar (the IT company that currently look after your website ...
    • Paying your Parish Online subscription

      Overview Parish Online is provided by Local Authority Technology CIC as an annual subscription service. When will I get invoiced? You will be sent an invoice by email whenever you first sign up Parish Online, or when your renewal is due. The email ...
    • Transfer a co.uk, org.uk or uk domain over to Parish Online

      Overview If you've switched to Parish Online as your Website and/or Email provider, you may well have an old domain that your previous website used. To avoid people continuing to visit that website you can get Parish Online to take over the ...
    • Uploading Data into Parish Online

      Overview Parish Online contains digital map data from a variety of sources, including the layers that our customers draw within the software itself. However, there are instances where other mapping data needs to be loaded into Parish Online to help ...
    • Provide your External Mail DNS settings to Parish Online

      Overview If you're opting out of our own mail service and want to use Microsoft 365, Google Workspace or any other mail system, you'll need to provide details of your email DNS settings to Parish Online. We'll then add those behind-the-scenes. Get ...