Development - Cycle Three Reflection and Cycle Four Overview
Published on June 5, 2024 by Shannon Wray
Here is a reflection of cycle three and an overview of the current; cycle four. Providing insight into our product roadmap and subsequently the projects that are being worked on in our six week cycles.
Cycle Three Reflection
Implemented
- We’ve integrated updates into the dashboard. Creating and editing of updates now takes place within the dashboard and is no longer available on profile pages.
- The dashboard-transactions tool has been tweaked and enhanced:
- View all the related transactions to any given transaction via the context menu.
- View, filter and search either by transaction creation dates or effective dates (dates entered manually by fiscal host admins when accounting for off-platform transactions).
- Search by transaction and transaction group IDs.
- Filtering based on refund status.
- The revised payment processor related fields (which have been available in export for a while) are now displayed in the details drawer.
- Accounting codes and categories are displayed.
- For dashboard users contribution details now live in a drawer inside dashboard. It now include an event timeline that reveals what happens behind the scenes with contributions and reveals clear information about potential errors that may occur in the contribution payment process. There are links to take you from a contribution to its related ledger transactions. For fiscal hosts there are also links that take you to the details in the payment processor applications.
- A transaction report is now visible also for collectives. It is a minimal report for now and we have ideas on how to continue to evolve it.
- Tax forms are now integrated as a core platform feature. Expense submitters that are required to submit tax forms are now seamlessly directed to do so on the platform (instead of having to use an external service mediated by emails). Fiscal Host admins can autonomously manage the forms submitted to them. It is a first “premium” feature we are releasing and is therefore priced separately for Fiscal Hosts.
- Improvements to the Hosted Collectives tool (for fiscal hosts):
- By default the tool, shows Collectives and funds but you can choose to also show projects and events.
- The balance shown in the list is now the total balance (for collectives that have projects and events) and there is a visual indicator to let you know that it is an aggregate result.
- A bug was fixed in the freeze functionality and a tag was added to highlight frozen collectives.
- A correct “hosted since” date is now displayed.
- Collectives can be sorted based on name and balance.
- Collectives can be filtered based on their balance.
- We’ve made “Pending Contributions” into a separate tool and renamed it “Expected Funds” and improved it’s filtering capabilities.
Research Outcomes
We were not able to move forward on all the research fronts. We did prioritize the crowdfunding redesign effort. We have a path forward to engage with this work and we have prioritized a first effort to build prototypes of new profile pages. Read more about it here.
Cycle Four Overview
In this cycle we continue with our focus to improve fiscal host efficiency, but we are finally ready to also begin the campaign for redesigning the platform crowdfunding experience.
Crowdfunding Redesign
This is a large project that will span numerous development cycles and the choices we make will effect all collectives. We are going to make an effort to work gradually and in the open so that collectives can trial the new designs and give us feedback early and frequently.
In this cycle we are taking a first step by building prototypes of two different kinds of collective profiles. One kind focuses on crowdfunding (the main function and purpose of public profiles). The other will focus on collective story-telling.
If all goes well, at the end of the cycle, collective admins (only!) will be able to preview (only!) their existing profiles pages with the new designs.
If we have the capacity for it we will also introduce a new “accounts” tool in collective dashboard. This will provide a financial overview of all the collective balances including projects and events.
Fiscal Host Efficiency
- A “Expense To Do” for fiscal hosts for reviewing and responding to comments on expenses. This addresses two intertwined frictions in the expense review process: calling attention to comments from expense submitters that need a response and confusion around the “incomplete” expense status.
- Enhancing chart-of-accounts to differentiate between expense categories that apply to Fiscal Host (operational) expenses and Collective (managed funds) expenses.
- An expense report based on accounting categories.
- We are initiating a campaign that will provide Fiscal Hosts with tools for efficiently adding to the platform transactions that occurred off-platform (such as incoming contributions and expenses that were paid directly via bank transfers).
- We will be conducting workshops to explore improvements to the ability to batch expenses.
View our previous cycle update here.
We welcome any feedback, feel free to either comment below or contact our team
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