What did we do in 2023?

1. Built out the dashboard experience.
2. Re-organized the tools inside it. 
3. Enhanced existing tools.
4. Migrated tools from public profiles into the dashboard.
5. Introduced the personal timeline experience.
6. Evolved a better and more consistent user experience (alongside the engineering shift to building with ready-made component libraries).

1. We created an “expense pipeline” experience where fiscal hosts can get an overview of the expenses that await their attention in their different statuses.
2. We enhanced the payment processor overview to give hosts indicators if they have enough funds available to pay the ready-to-pay expenses in the pipeline. 
3. We made improvements to the way expenses flow between expense submitter, collective admins and fiscal host admins.
4. We made improvements to the expense review and payment screens to speed up fiscal hosts ability to process expenses.
5. We built an MVP for “Agreements” with an eye for future enhancements. 
6. We made improvements to fiscal host search tools within the dashboard.
7. We updated the “Hosted Collectives” tool to adopt the dashboard patterns and prepare it to become a tool that serves more fiscal host needs. 

1. We acknowledge that it is critical for fiscal hosts be able to effectively and reliably integrate information from the platform into their accounting platforms and processes.
2. We do not aspire to become an accounting platform.
3. We do need to make a concerted effort to gracefully address fiscal hosts accounting needs in order for the platform to become an appealing solution for fiscal hosts (and any other organizations that will attempt to use the platform for money management).

1. Enhancing pending contributions to enable fiscal host to track and reconcile expected incoming funds.
2. We corrected some tax-related issues and then towards the end of the year completed a ledger refactor in which both payment processor fees and taxes are recorded as separate transactions.
3. We enhanced the CSV export capability. 
4. We built Vendors to enable fiscal hosts to properly account for expenses and contributions without having to create pseudo-profiles on the platform.
5. We built a chart-of-accounts tools focused on expense-related accounting categories.
6. We used that chart-of-accounts for implementing an expense categorization process that both enables fiscal hosts to categorize expense and (if the fiscal hosts choose to) involve expense submitters and collective admins in expense categorization.
7. Introduced a major redesign of the ledger transactions tool (for both fiscal hosts and other platform accounts).

1. Enhanced our Stripe integration to allow for more payment methods.
2. Introduced password logins (finally!), Yubikey support and enhanced Webauthn support. 
3. Performance improvements.  
4. Expanded our fraud protections into a broader expense validator.
5. Adopting a UI component strategy and library and revising our design guidelines to accommodate it.
6. Added a personal timeline experience in personal dashboard.
7. Introduced the ability to follow a collective and have their updates show up in the personal timeline.

What awaits us in 2024?

1. Accounting readiness continues to be a primary focus. It is key for the scalability of hosts and Open Collective ecosystem. We are starting with more improvements to our export and testing the possibility and potential of integrating with accounting systems. 
2. We would like to offer better fiscal hosts in-platform reporting tools.
3. Our crowdfunding capabilities are also up for review. We’ve given the administrative tasks a dedicated home in Dashboard. This makes it possible for us to redesign collective profile pages to uniquely and properly serve the crowdfunding function.
4. Continued dashboard work on missing tools & capabilities and enhancements to existing tools. 
5. Research into how we can better serve funds and grants on the platform.
6. Further improvements to host efficiency with a focus on host-collective communications.  
7. In order to deploy changes to our business model we will need to work on both our marketing pages and potentially back-end and administrative tools.
8. Starting a conversation about refined transparency. The platform was built for “radical transparency” which is not always what is called for. We would like expand our “transparency offering” to address the needs of users and organizations that could benefit from our collective money management but cannot do so because of the transparency it currently forces upon them.