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Expense checklist

4 min read

Expenses are only paid when:

  1. They are submitted on Open Collective…
  2. To a project balance with sufficient funds…
  3. Following the specific guidance for the particular type of expense (i.e., invoice, reimbursement, grant request, or mileage) and with the proper documentation described there (i.e., invoice to Raft or itemized receipt)…
  4. Approved by a Project Lead (other than the submitter, unless there is only one) and clearly in support of the project’s charitable purposes…
  5. And matching legal names for the recipient and bank account holder

Read below for additional details on these requirements.

Unpayable expenses

Naturally, there are also exceptions - expenses that we can never pay due to government regulations and our own operational limitations. See Unpayable expenses for a list of those we currently know.

1. Submitting on Open Collective

Start by reading Open Collective’s guidance here.

A note on addresses

Our payment processor, Wise, does not allow the address associated with your bank account to be a P.O. Box. It must be a proper residential address.

Non-OC expenses

If an expense cannot be paid on Open Collective, for example if:

  • You are working with a large, corporate, and/or university vendor that is asking/insisting that you to set things up in their system
  • Because of bureaucracy and/or the power dynamic with the payee, you would rather us just send them the funds, and not ask them to set up an Open Collective account

…or for some other reason, please contact us.

2. Project balances

As soon as the project has sufficient funds, a submitted and approved expense will become available for payment by our admin team. A project’s balance can be viewed on their Open Collective profile.1 Wondering why an expense has not been paid? Reach out to us and we will be happy to help.

3. Specific guidance by expense type

Make sure to follow the specific guidance for the particular type of expense

4. Expense approvals

All expenses should be, in the words of the IRS, “ordinary” and “necessary”:

  • Ordinary: be common, reasonable, and accepted in the nonprofit industry
  • Necessary: be helpful toward a Raft project and appropriate for accomplishing our overall mission

Now, at Raft we think your work is extraordinary - but what they are really saying, here, it should be clear to a neutral outside observer that the expense supports the furtherance of the project’s mission.

As long as that is the case, and the project leaders expected you to submit the expense, approval should be no problem. :)

Approving your own expenses

We generally only allow project leads to approve their own expenses when they are the sole leader of a project. We recommend that projects with more than one project lead turn on the related setting in Open Collective, found in Dashboard → Settings → Policies:

To avoid fraud, we check to make sure that the legal name of the person or entity shown as the payee in Open Collective matches the bank account holder name:

In order to edit your legal and display names, see our guide.

to edit your “legal name” for your Open Collective account. Please do the following: Make sure you are logged in to Open Collective. On desktop or mobile, click on the profile image circle in the upper right hand corner of the screen, then select “Settings.” Edit your “Legal Name.” You may make your “display name whatever you want, or make it just “Coffee Worker.” Click “Save” at the bottom!

To edit the bank account name, go back and edit the expense, and either edit the current payment method or submit a new one.

Footnotes

  1. If you do not have the link to the profile for the project you want to support, feel free to review the list of projects on our profile, or contact us and we will be happy to help. ↩

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