Spending Money

You can use Open Collective to approve and reject expenses submitted to your Collective, and track their progress.

The Open Collective platform enables you to view all submitted expenses, and either approve or reject them.

If your collective is hosted by a Fiscal Host. Collective and Fiscal Host admins will both need to review and approve an expense for it to be paid.

Expense policy

We recommend that you provide information and guidance to expense submitters about the types of expenses you are willing to pay, and what information you need to make the process easier. You can do this by creating an expense policy, which you can share with your community. Go to Creating Your Policies to learn how to do this.

While creating your Expense Policy, you can disable expense submissions from the general public entirely by selecting the option "Only allow expenses to be created by Team Members and Financial Contributors (they may invite expenses from other payees)."

Receiving incoming expenses

When someone submits an expense:

• an email will be sent to all Collective admins, showing the sender, the amount, and other info

• the expense will appear on your Collective’s transparent budget

When you receive an expense, you have a few options:

Approving the expense

As a Collective admin, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the submitted expense is legitimate. If you believe this is the case, you can approve it. This will send a notification to the submitter.

If the collective has sufficient funds to pay the expense, it will also notify the Fiscal Host admin(s), who will need to review the expense to ensure it is legally and fiscally valid.

If the collective does not have sufficient funds, the expense will wait until sufficient funds are available.

Once both parties are satisfied, the expense will be paid by the Fiscal Host.

Rejecting the expense

If you are not satisfied with the expense for whatever reason, you can reject it. The submitter will then be notified. We recommend adding a comment to explain why you have done so.

You cannot delete an expense until you have rejected it.

Marking the expense as spam

If you do not recognize the expense or the sender, you can reject the expense and then mark it as spam. This will remove all transactions from this user, and block the sender from submitting any more expenses on Open Collective.

Tagging your expenses

Learn more about tagging your expenses.