Hi!
Is it right that all the pending expenses have disappeared? I wanted to pay them all now that PayPal seems functional again, but can't find them.
thanks!
Leen

I deleted them and consolidated them into a single payment, which you did pass.
Do you know if we still need to add a markup for the paypal fee and, if so, how much should I tell our volunteers to add on to the reimbursements to cover that exta paypal fee?

1046.00 - 986.56 = 59.44 is how much was missing from the last payment in terms of exchange rate, which is about 5.68% difference from the original.

Should we use 6% as the extra markup for paypal fee? Do you know the exact amount?

I added a screenshot of the exact payment I did in the expense itself

https://opencollective.com/symbiosis-pdx/expenses/93357

I deleted the screenshot because it lists the email of the recipient publicly

Extracting from the screenshot the numbers, 
1045.52*0.9454 = 988.43
which is still off by almost 2 dollars but I take it that you are at least paying the paypal fee, so I think that answers my question

That said though, that conversion rate seems very off, the rate google is listing is 
1.01 eur = 1 USD

I also checked the historical exchange rates for yesterday and they are 0.99 and still not 0.94, which for a payment that large is a noticable difference...

Is there a way we could bypass the currency exchange and work directly with dollars? The exchange rate is unfavorable and causing our volunteers to lose money. Should we just assume that there will be a 5% difference in exchange rate in the future and ask for more money to that amount as a result?

ah, that is where the screenshot went! It suddenly disappeared, I got confused.
The conversations under expenses are not public, only admins can see them, and the person uploading the expense. (the conversations here are public though)

For the rates, I have no access at all to those rates. I simply make a manual transfer via the PayPal page, they pick the rates. I can not change anything. All for Climate is not charging anything for making those payments, all fees are charged by the PayPal platform, automatically. What I do when I indicate 'paid' is that I manually add the fee (in this case it was 4,70) to the expense, so the collective pays, not the volunteer.

To avoid exchange rates:
- I have a feeling that Wise.com is a lot cheaper than PayPal. 
- You can always join one of the fiscal hosts in the US. Have a look in 'find a fiscal host' in the menubar at the bottom of your page.

The issue with wise payments is that they have a low reputation and some of our volunteers don't want to use them.

I understand you don't have control over the rates, but effectively it looks like they are always unfavorable to the tune of about 5%, so I'm thinking it might make sense for us to add on 5% to whatever the conversion is on google so our volunteers get a full refund back. Alternatively I guess we could submit second requests after the fact to make up for the difference, as we have done in the past but it just seems like more work. If you think the latter method makes more sense we'll do it that way but if the first seems accurate enough it would be easier for us.

I'm ok with both options - the more 'proof of cost and payment' I have for expenses, the better.