Spending Money
You can use Open Collective to approve and reject expenses submitted to your Collective, and track their progress.
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You can use Open Collective to approve and reject expenses submitted to your Collective, and track their progress.
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The Open Collective platform enables you to view all submitted expenses, and either approve or reject them.
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 to learn how to do this.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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