The Fiscal Host Dashboard is your one-stop-shop for seeing all the information and completing your actions as host admin.

How do I get to the Host Dashboard?

Click the Admin button on your host page, while logged in as host admin.

What can I do on the host dashboard?

A vendor represents an external entity that fiscal hosts can attribute contributions or expenses to. Vendors have no public profile and are only able to be created and edited by Fiscal Host Admins.

Navigate to your Fiscal Host Dashboard and select Vendors.

Review existing Vendors

Utilize our potential vendor tool to transform any past organizations into vendors and contribute to a cleaner platform.

These are organizations that any admin of your fiscal host is also an admin of. They have been used to submit an expense to either your fiscal host or any of your collectives.

Create a vendor

You can create a vendor by clicking on “Create Vendor”

You will then be prompted to provide the following vendor information.

• Image (optional)

• Vendors Name

• Vendors Legal Name (optional)

• Tax Form (optional)

  • Tax Form URL (optional)

• Tax Identification

  • Identification System (optional)

  • ID Number (optional)

• Mailing Address (optional)

• Contact Name (optional)

• Contact's email (optional)

• Payout method (optional)

• Notes (optional)

Edit and update a vendor

Click on an existing vendor to call up a side-drawer that will display the current vendor information.

To edit the vendor details click on Edit Vendor

When you are done editing click on Update Vendor.

Archive/unarchive a Vendor

Click on the three dots to the right of the Vendor and select the Archive button.

You can view all archived vendors in the archived tab. Within this view you can unarchive vendors.

Assign contributions to vendors

When creating contributions (through either added funds or expected funds) you can attribute the contribution to a vendor by typing in the vendors name.

You can also create a new vendor by simply entering a vendor name and clicking Create Vendor.

You can add additional vendor information via the Vendor settings in your fiscal host dashboard.

Submit an expense on behalf of a vendor

When submitting an expense you can attribute it to a vendor by typing in the vendors name. Only vendors with a payment method will be shown.

You will not be prompted for a payment method. The payment method that is listed for the vendor in the vendor settings will be used to process the payment.

Enabling other expense submitters to submit expenses on behalf of vendors

By default, only fiscal host admins are able to submit expenses to vendors. However, you can enable expense submitters to also submit expenses to your vendors.

To enable this, go to the Fiscal host dashboard, settings, Policies. There you will find an option to enable others (users who are not fiscal host admins) to submit expenses to vendors.

If this is enabled expense submitters will be able to choose a vendor from a list of the vendors that have a payment method.

If a expense submitter encounters a new vendor they have to reach out to their fiscal host to ask that the vendor be created.

This section of the dashboard shows all of your incoming contributions. You can filter this section by Period, Amount and Status.

This section on the dashboard shows all of your current pending applications to join your fiscal host. You are able to see the Title, Admins, Purpose, Application message and Email of the Collective. You can then Approve or Reject their application.

Contacting Pending Applications

Click on the little mail icon to contact a group that has applied to your fiscal host.

To view a list of all of Hosted Collectives. Navigate to your dashboard - Collectives - Hosted collectives.

You can view your hosted collectives, their admins, fee structure, how long they've been hosted for and their balance.

Sort by

You are able to sort by Hosted since (Oldest - Newest), Balance (Lowest - Highest) and Name (A - Z).

Search

Either find the collective listed on the page or look for them by name via the search bar.

Tabs

Utilize the tabs to view all, active, frozen or unhosted collectives.

Filters

Using the filters at the top of the page, you can sort by Fee Structure, Type, Status and Balance . The page is automatically set to show Collectives and Funds, you can customize this to also show projects and events.

Filter by fee structure: global host fee (the standard fee you set in your settings) or a custom fee.

More Actions

Click on the three dots to View Details, View Transations, Add funds, Agreements, Contact, Freeze or Unhost the Collective.

View Details

View details brings up a side draw which provide more details about the Collective including their recent activity.

Set Fee Structure

You will be prompted to either choose your global fee structure or to create a custom fee for this specific Collective.

Expense Types

Use the Global host settings or Enable or Disable Invoices, Reimbursements or Grants.

More Actions

Click the More Actions button to Add funds, Agreements, Contact, Freeze or Unhost the Collective.

Add Funds

To Add Funds you will need to fill in the required information.

Add Agreements

To Add an Agreement you will need to fill in the required information.

Contact Collective

Directly contact your collectives with the contact button.

Additional security measures

As an added security measure/compliance option for fiscal hosts, their Admins can now freeze or un host a collective- this may be useful for compliance reasons, violations of terms, or if a collective wants to leave but hasn’t removed the fiscal host themselves already.

Freezing a Collective

Freezing a Collective means temporarily limiting what a collective (and their connected Projects & Events) can and cannot do on the platform.

Freezing a Collective will block all financial activity within that Collective. They will not be able to accept funds, pay out expenses, post updates, create new Events or Projects, or add new Team members under this collective. However, they will still continue to receive recurring donations that were started before this freeze.

Contributions and expenses will be removed from the Collective's public profile, and admins will be informed of why the action was taken.

Unhosting a Collective

We've also added the ability to un-host a collective, which can be used to free a Collective to choose another host or to become an independent collective.

• This Fiscal Host will no longer manage money on behalf of the Collective.

• Any active recurring PayPal contributions or Virtual Cards will be cancelled.

• Unhosted collectives can then apply to a different fiscal host or become an Independent Collective.

• Valid Stripe configurations (either through the Fiscal Host or via an IC) by the time we trigger the recurring contributions (beginning of the month) will be properly charged.

• Stripe recurring contributions are charged are able to be transferred to a new host. If the collective has a new host, they continue as usual. If they don't, the contribution will be cancelled.

Before un-hosting, a Collective's balance must be zeroed by paying expenses, making contributions to other Collectives or gifting the balance to the host.

Steps to un host a Collective (if they want to join another Fiscal Host)

1. The collective will make a one-time donation to their new fiscal host in the amount of the balance.

   1. Make sure "The payee is covering the fees" is checked when paying the Expense so the Collective can empty the balance precisely to the cent.

2. The collective admin will need to update the collective's status on the platform to ‘un-host’ it from their current Fiscal Host.

3. The collective admin will need to apply to the new Fiscal Host.

4. The new Fiscal Host will add them to their hosted collectives and reallocate the balance via ‘add funds’ to the collective.

The transaction report for Fiscal Hosts that summarizes ledger activity for a given period of time (eg: month, quarter) and “explains” everything that happens in the ledger.

Each line in the report is based on a set of underlying transactions from the selected period. All the transactions in the selected time period are represented in the report and each transactions is only counted once. The report is therefore an accurate summary of all the transactions in the ledger.

View your Reports via your Dashboard → Reports.

The report is divided into two parts:

• Managed funds represents transactions that occur for the collectives you host (this accounts for funds you hold on behalf of your hosted collectives).

• Operational funds represents transactions that occur for you as a fiscal host (this accounts for your organizational funds as they are represented on the platform).

At the bottom of each section you will find a summary that shows:The balance at the beginning of the report time frame.

• The change in balance during the report time frame.

• The balance at the end of the report time frame.

Exporting

At the top of the report you will find a button that provides you:

1. An option to download a CSV file of all the ledger transactions for the selected time period.

2. An option to download a CSV file of the summary data in the report itself.

Transaction Details

All the numbers in the report are directly linked to the underlying ledger transactions making it possible for admins to better understand the report and validate it against the transactions.

Each line in the report has a context menu from which you can:

1. View Transactions: Link to the summarized underlying transactions - clicking this will direct you to a filtered list of transactions that were summarized to generate the resulting report value.

2. Export Transactions: Directly export the underlying transactions and validate the results - clicking this will display a download

Filter

Type

• All expenses

• Charge

• Invoice

• Receipt

• Grant

• Settlement

• Unclassified

Payout

• All methods

• Open Collective

• Bank Transfer

• PayPal

• Virtual Card

• Other

Period

• All time

• Today

• This Month

• Past Week

• Past Month

• Past Year

Custom Date selection

• Timezone - Local or UTC - By default, all dates are filtered and displayed using your local timezone. You can switch to UTC to indicate that the dates provided above use the Coordinated Universal Time format, which matches how email reports are generated.

• Start Date

• End Date

Amount

• All

• $0 - $50

• $50 - $500

• $500 - $5,000

• $5,000 and above

Status

• Pending: Expense was submitted to the collective. We're waiting for the collective admin to approve this expense.

• Approved: Expense was approved by a collective admin. We're now waiting for the Fiscal Host admin to pay for it.

• Rejected: Collective admin rejected the expense. This is a possible final state for the Expense.

• Processing: Expense was paid by the Fiscal Host. We're waiting for a third-party service (Wise or PayPal) to confirm the transaction was completed.

• Error: Expense was paid by the Fiscal Host but something went wrong with the transaction. This is a possible final state for the Expense, the Fiscal Host will probably reach out to the User to solve any possible issue.

• Paid: Expense was sucessfully paid. This is the final state for the expense.

• SPAM: This Expense was marked as SPAM and will be ignored. This is the final state for the expense

• Incomplete: Marks the expense as incomplete if there are important details missing to complete the payment. Only Approved/Error expenses can be marked as incomplete.

This action allows a comment to be added to the Expense activity logs and also emails the user requesting their attention.

After the user edits the expense, the expense is moved back to its previous state unless the amount is also changed, which will set the expense as Pending so the collective admin can reevaluate it.

• Ready to Pay - Reference the Go to Pay section below.

Order

• Newest First

• Oldest First

Paying Expenses

Security Checks

We're adding warnings about payees to protect Collectives and Hosts from fraudulent expense claims.

These warnings are designed to inform you as to whether you should approve or pay an expense. They are not a part of an enforcible policy within Open Collective but we encourage hosts and Collectives to consider creating and documenting policies as part of their terms or code of conducts if needed.

You can review the Security Checks by clicking the shield button. This button varies in color following the highest risk level we found in the expense. In the case the expense poses a high-security level, we're also presenting this information as a necessary confirmation before you go to the Pay modal.

The security checks are categorized in scope and risk level. The categories are:

• User: The user who submitted the expense, the author of the expense or draft sent as an invite to submit the expense.

• Payee: If the beneficiary is not the user who originally submitted the expense, we also list checks on that profile through the Payee scope.

• Payout Method: The actual beneficiary information that is going to be paid by the expense.

The risk levels are:

• PASS: Opposite of a security risk, actually indicates good record or behavior.

• INFO/LOW: Contextual information for transparency sake, these are informations that may be important on a particular context but are not meaningful by themselves.

• MEDIUM: Important to consider, may require some investigation given the context.

• HIGH: Represents a risk or complete lack of information and requires investigation. This behavior was previously related to fraud.

It is important to understand that these checks are evaluated independently, and it is up to the host admin to evaluate the whole context and take their decision. The security checks currently implemented are listed below, but keep in mind that we'll keep working on adding new check routines and adjusting their existing levels. Some of the existing security checks include:

• User impersonation checks based on IP correlation and Connected Accounts username overlaps.

• User 2FA status conveys the security risk of the author account itself.

• User role in the Collective and/or Fiscal Host exposing how the user relates to the collective or fiscal host.

• Past user behaviour based on expenses rejected or marked as spam.

• Past expenses that have been submitted on the platform and in the same collective.

• Bank account information and PayPal email correlation between users and collectives.

Go to Pay

Green button showing that an expense has been approved and there are sufficient funds. If you click this button, the pay expense modal will be displayed and you'll be able to pay for the expense using a suitable method.

The action button displayed in this modal will vary with the available integration the host have and the payout method selected by the user who submitted the expense.

In the case you're paying with PayPal, if you click the action button the expense will automatically be paid from the connected PayPal account. If you're using PayPal Payouts, the expense will be marked as Scheduled for Payment and automatically processed by the payment worker.

In the case you're paying with Wise, if you click the action button the expense will automatically be paid from your main Wise balance. If your Wise requires OTP authorization, the expense will be Scheduled for Payment and a banner will be displayed on top of your expenses list so you can pay all the scheduled expenses in a batch with a single validation.

Mark as Paid

Green button for manual payments. After paying via another method (bank transfer, etc), click this to deduct the amount for the Collective's budget in the system.

Edit

Host admins have permission to edit expenses at any time. For example, someone wasn't able to attach their receipt and emailed it instead, and you are adding it for them.

Note: If you edit an expense, it must be re-approved.

Open Expense

If you click the title of an individual expense, you will go to that expense's page. There, you can see all details and read or add comments.

Connect PayPal & refill balance

PayPal allows you to pre-approve $2,000 at a time to be paid through the API. This is a security feature. This means after you've paid out $2,000 in expenses, you need to refill the balance. If you try to pay an expense and get an error about the PayPal balance, it's time to refill.

When you click "refill balance" you will be prompted to log in to PayPal, and afterwards you'll be taken back to your dashboard.

You can see the connected PayPal account in the top right. This is the account expenses will be paid out of.

If you manage multiple PayPal accounts, make sure it's the right one! If it's not correct, open PayPal in another tab and manually log out, then click "refill balance" and use credentials for the right account.

Payment Error Troubleshooting

Payment errors will show in red next to the expense if they come up.

Common reasons for a payment to fail after clicking the "Pay with PayPal" button:

• Need to refill the pre-approval balance

  • Click the 'refill balance' button

• Insufficient funds to cover fees

  • There are not enough funds in the Collective to pay this expense. Many Collectives submit expenses in anticipation of future funding.

  • If a user submits an expense for 100% of the Collective's balance, there won't be enough to cover processing fees

  • Edit the expense total down to leave enough for the fees and inform the user by leaving a comment

• User's PayPal account is restricted

  • Ask the user to log into PayPal and resolve the issue on their side

Multi-Currency Expenses

Here is an example of how a Multi-Currency expense will show in the expense list. The amount will show in the expense currency, with the amount converted into the host currency below.

The same will show in the pay expenses modal. Example below.

This section is still in beta and provides summaries of your Total Money Managed, Total amount of host fees collected, Contributions and Expenses graphs. Filter by Date, collective and generate a CSV report.