Over the last couple of years, as fiscal hosts have grown and matured, they have come to rely more closely on Open Collective for accounting and legal compliance purposes. This places more rigorous demands on the Open Collective ledger, which records all the transactions that take place on the platform. Over the last few development cycles we’ve made some updates to the ledger itself and released an updated transactions tool that gives you direct access to the ledger. The new transactions report and CSV export continue that effort.
The ledger itself, especially from a fiscal host perspective, is complex and can be challenging to navigate and understand. The new transactions report and CSV export were designed to address this.
Transaction Report
Introducing a new Transactions Report for fiscal hosts. This is a report that summarizes ledger activity for a given period of time (eg: month, quarter) and “explains” everything that happens in the ledger. The report has two parts:
Managed funds represent transactions that occur for your hosted collectives (this accounts for funds you hold on the platform on behalf of your collectives).
Operational funds represent transactions that occur for you as a fiscal host (this accounts for your organizational funds as they are represented on the platform).
In each section, you will find summarized values for contributions, expenses and fees.
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.
We have upgraded the Transaction Export tool to make it easier to repeatedly export clear and reliable transaction data for you to process off-platform.
We’ve re-organized the fields (renamed them, added tooltips and deprecated legacy fields that were causing confusion).
We’ve created a new default export field set to reflect changes that we made to the ledger recently (transforming payment processor fees & taxes into separate transactions, improving the exported payment method information and exporting effective dates) while providing backward compatibility for users who have come to rely on the previous export format.
You can also configure and save your own export presets.
Dread Knight
Posted on April 10, 2024