Change Fiscal Host
You can change the fiscal host of your Collective to a different existing host, or start your own host and move it there.
It's not possible to change to a Fiscal Host with a different currency than your Collective began with if there are already any financial transactions associated. You need to change to a Fiscal Host with the same currency or start a new Collective with the new currency and Fiscal Host.
What does it mean to change fiscal hosts?
Your fiscal host is the house where your Collective "lives" legally and financially. Moving house means your Collective's funds will go to the new host organization's bank account, and the new fiscal host assumes legal responsibility for your project. The new host admin will be the one pressing the "pay" button on your approved expenses.
What are the benefits of being able to change hosts?
No lock-in! If you start out being fiscally hosted by another organization and eventually want to set up your own legal entity, you can move your Collective. This is great for projects that are bootstrapping early on and later build more legal infrastructure.
You can also change between established fiscal host organizations. If you start out under a generalist host, you may later switch when a host-specific to your movement or focus area forms. This can happen when a movement scales up, for example. Or you might want to move hosts to change the currency your Collective is in from Dollars to Euros.
What happens to my recurring financial contributions, followers of updates, and transaction history?
Some recurring contributions can be automatically transferred. Some others, like PayPal subscriptions, cannot be transferred and will need to be manually re-established by your contributors.
The people that are subscribed to your updates will continue to receive them. Your history of transactions will remain intact. Your donors or sponsors are unlikely to notice any changes to your Collective (except the little "hosted by" text on your page).
What is the process for changing fiscal hosts?
Before starting the process of changing Fiscal Hosts, get in touch with your new Fiscal Host to confirm they are ready to approve your request to join them.
Your fiscal host determines whose bank account your money sits in. To change hosts, you need to take all the funds out of the old bank account. You have two options to zero your collective balance. You can either send the funds directly to the new host or manually zero your collective balance.
Sending funds directly to the new host
Zeroing your collective balance
2. Navigate to your Collectives Dashboard > Settings > Fiscal Host
3. Remove your current Fiscal Host.
4. Select Create a fiscal host (if you want to set up your own), Apply to an existing host (if you'll be hosted by another entity), or visit the page of the Fiscal Host you wish to join and click on the Apply button.
5. Wait for your new Fiscal Host to approve your request.
You are done! Your Collective will be live in the new host right away.
What if I want to move to a different platform instead?
Open Collective is open source, so it's technically possible to fork the codebase and set it up on your own servers. This means you would no longer use opencollective.com and would be on your own website.
You can move Collectives from Fiscal Hosts on opencollective.com to a host set up on your own site. It's also possible to transfer over your recurring financial contributions (Stripe subscriptions).
However, Stripe support needs to make those transfers as it requires them to authenticate with your own Stripe account totally independent of Open Collective. They have performed this service in the past, but the timeframe and details are outside Open Collective's control.
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