As we empower ever-larger communities to manage their money together we're beginning to look more closely at our governance tools. Today we're launching the first part of a 'two-to-sign' process that ensures at least two people are involved in the payment of an expense.
We've added an option under the Policies section of your Collective's Settings to stop admins from approving their own expenses: With this feature enabled admins will require another admin to approve their expenses before they are passed to hosts for payment. This is an early launch of a feature for Collectives that merely supports a good-faith agreement between admins. i.e. another admin could merely disable this feature to circumvent it.
Is this something you would prefer to enforce as a host? Is it something that you'd like to have enforced as a Collective? We're keen to hear what you think. Leave your comments on this post or email [email protected].
This is useful for big collectives as the post suggests maybe.
For us the biggest problem is that I am currently the only one in the collective that "knows" how to write an invoice: So it's not like the others do nothing, but they don't know how to write proper invoice (since there's always potentially taxation issues / documents / bureaucracy attached in many EU countries) and said since I do most work anyway I should get the money. For example in Germany, you can not write an invoice as a private person (only under some conditions if you sell a physical thing and then not regularly either), you need to be freelancer or small entrepreneur instead, and then the whole mess with the tax declaration etc starts (it's really not easy for people that don't know how and to make it worse, we are mostly from different EU countries that have different rules with that). They could maybe submit expenses, the problem is, what they do is helping people in Discord or doing documentation, so they would have to write an invoice for that, since it's an service, not an expense. I don't know how to solve this issue. I guess if they want to be paid for notable work, the only way is to register as freelancer or small company with all the bureaucracy that that causes here in most EU countries.
With OC Europe fiscal host, we are confronted with the same challenge.
While we do not offer a payroll option to the collectives, there are some dev/workers who are invoicing their collective through cooperatives of entrepreneurs (aka cooperative of activities).
These are quite famous in Belgium and France. The worker joins the cooperative (i.e. Smart / Elycoop) as an entrepreneur-employee. It is therefore the employer (i.e. Smart / Elycoop) that invoices OC Europe so that the workers can include the money earned on open collective in their income . The advantage is that it requires minimal paperwork from the worker as it is the role of the coop to figure out any tax related issues. The other advantage is that this system can be used for any type of social / open source work, and for any amount of money.
Happy to discuss this topic further if you are interested in this type of solution.
Being knowledgeable, who is coming into our private space is who we are when it comes down to who will receive what amount. Consider what was done and the amount of time that was involved in the project and also the cost that was involved also.
Sam Toland
Posted on February 18, 2022