Fiscal Host Policies

Read on to learn how to set your Fiscal Host policies directly inside of your Open Collective dashboard.

Access your policy settings by navigating to your Fiscal Host Dashboard > Settings > Policies.

Contributions

You can set a Contribution policy to let potential contributors know what kind of funds you will and will not accept. You can also make certain information required when submitting a contribution to help you remain legally compliant. For the following categories, you can set minimum contribution thresholds so that if a contribution comes in above that amount, contributors are required to provide this information to continute:

• Legal Name

• Physical Address

Expenses Policy

It can be daunting to file an expense if you're not sure what's allowed. Provide a clear policy to guide expense submitters. You can provide different policies for the various types of expenses that are possible to submit on Open Collective:

• Invoice Expenses Policy

• Receipt Expenses Policy

• Grant Expenses Policy

• Expenses Title Policy

Required Admins

You can use this policy to enforce the minimum number of admins that a collective needs in order to be accepted by your host.

In order to do so, simply select the number of admins you want to enforce. To turn it off, select Do not enforce a minimum number of admins.

After setting a minimum number of admins you won't be able to approve Pending Applications from collectives that do not have enough admins. You'll be able to open an exception for collectives that already invited enough admins, even though these invitations are still pending.

It is also possible to automatically prevent these collectives that have pending admins from receiving contributions with the freeze feature:

In this scenario, if you decide to open an exception to a collective that still doesn't satisfy the minimum number of admins, you'll make sure they only start to raise funds after they have enough signed-up admins.

Expense Approvals

The Expense Approval settings allow you to set specific requirements for expenses that are submitted to Collectives that your organization hosts. These settings include:

• Enabling and disabling admins from approving their own expenses

  • Options for only enforcing this under specific circumstances, like if a certain payment minimum is hit.

• Enabling and disabling non-team members and contributors from submitting expenses to your hosted Collectives

Expense Types

Specify the types of expenses allowed for the collectives you're hosting. Allow receipts, invoices, and grants.

If you wish to set custom options for specific Collectives, navigate to the Hosted Collectives section. You can either use the global host settings or specify custom options.

Vendors

By default only fiscal host administrators can submit expenses on behalf of vendors. You can allow other users who submit expenses to collectives you host to also submit expenses on behalf vendors.

Expense Categorization

Involve expense submitters and collective admins in expense categorization, based on the categories you've set up in your chart of accounts. From your Fiscal Host Policies settings you can:

• Require expense submitters to select a category when submitting an expense

• Require collective admins to verify expense categories when reviewing and approving expenses

Rejected Categories

Specify any category of contributor that you do not want to accept money from to automatically prevent these types of contributions.

Choose from the following categories:

• Adult websites

• Affliate and review websites

• Casinos and gambling

• Insurance & financial products (credit)

• Pharmacy products (weight loss, anti-aging)

• SEO services & social media buying

• VPN and proxy services

• Essay writing services

You can also reject contributions individually using the reject button on specific unwanted transactions.

Refunds

You can enable and disable Collective admins to refund contributions for up to 30 days after the transaction date.