Managing Money

All Collectives on Open Collective have transparent ledgers which are visible to all. Find out how to track your incomings and outgoings and plan for the future.

We believe that financial transparency creates stronger collaboration, so everyone can see how money flows in and out of your Collective. We help you collect recurring or one-off contributions from sponsors, supporters, or members. Money contributed to a Collective goes to the bank account of the Fiscal Host.

It’s up to each community to decide how to spend their funds. Some communities delegate financial decision-making to a specific person or role, some develop policies about what should be funded, and others have processes to make spending decisions together as a group.

Some common expenses are website hosting costs, maintaining documentation, community moderation, conference travel expenses, food at meetups, time spent working on specific features, or even paying someone to work on a project full time!

When someone wants to be paid, they submit an expense through your Collective page. After you approve it, the person will be reimbursed by the Fiscal Host. Expenses are visible publicly, so everyone can see how much money was spent and on what (though private details like emails, names, and addresses are only visible to that user and the admins).

Find out more

Open Collective provides a number of tools for budgeting and managing your community's money: Budgets Show your balance, recent transactions and approximate annual budget, or your collectives contributions and expenses with our budget visualization. Projects Use projects to allocate project-specific funds. Tagging Use tags to categorize and organize expenses.