Fiscal Host
Up to: Legal, Financial WG
Summary
We need to
- exist as some kind of legal entity
- be able to pay the bills
- and also accept donations/grants
We don't want to start our own nonprofit unless we really have to, so a fiscal host allows us to behave like a nonprofit by allowing another organization to process money on our behalf.
Platform 6
References
Application
Apply via the OpenCollective page.
Fiscal Hosting Criteria:
1. We're all about encouraging cooperative projects, so we'd normally expect your project to be explicitly cooperative in nature. You might be in the start-up phase of a new cooperative enterprise, doing cooperative development work, or something similar. Let us know.
2. While we're offering a zero fee approach, our focus is on supporting organisations for a relatively short period of time. We're expecting that you are on a pathway that will most likely see you with your own bank account within six months or so. Nothing hard and fast, but a rough guide. If you anticipate using the fiscal hosting service for much longer then let us know. We won't rule you out, but we might want to talk about some form of payment in respect of the not insignificant amount of work that we do behind the scenes to handle all of the accounting.
This seems reasonable, we can just let them know we're doing something similar to social.coop and want to be straight up with them that we might not establish our own independent legal entity unless we need to. - jonny
There's separate fees for OpenCollective (OC) as well. So it would be nice to first talk to Platform 6. Get all the financial cost details. Then open the OC account since we'd need to list our fiscal host there when we create the account. afaik, we can't have a collective on OC without a) bank account or b) fiscal host (who'd have a bank account) - manisha