Creating Your Policies

Creating policies on Open Collective gives contributors and expense submitters clarity on what they need to do to meet your standards.

By setting a policy, you’re giving your community a clear sense of what you will accept. This may include information about what information you require on an expense, how regularly you pay expenses, or the types of groups who you do not allow to contribute to your cause.

Setting your policies

To complete your policies, go to your Collective’s Dashboard > Settings > Policies.

You will be able to customize your policy using the following options:

Contribution policy: Outline the types of contributions you are willing to accept and which are likely to be rejected. For example, you may not be willing to accept donations from groups that do not match your ethical standards.

Expenses policy: Give submitters an idea of what they need to do to get their expenses approved. You can include details such as:

• How to title and describe expenses

• Which types of expense are acceptable

• What evidence or receipts to include

• Where to make invoices out to

• How quickly invoices are paid (and whether you do so at a particular time of the month)

This will be shown to the right of the expense submission process.

If you are a Collective hosted by a Fiscal Host, you may wish to link to their policy page or info here as well (if available). You should also check to make sure your policies are consistent with theirs.

Expense approvals: You can select “admins cannot approve their own expenses” (which requires another admin to approve the submission). This can also be set for expenses over a certain amount.

You can also limit expense submissions to team members and financial contributors.

Rejected categories: This enables you to automatically block certain categories of contributor from submitting expenses. Learn more about this on our Rejecting and Refunding Financial Contributions page.

Fiscal Host Policies: Fiscal Hosts can set policies that apply to hosted projects in addition to their own collectives. For more information, see Fiscal Hosts.