Proposal for meet.coop to use open collective

Our #organizational-operations group, with #product-strategy-and-services, discussed the options of how to collect money (including Open Collective vs. Stripe use by collective.tools), surfaced various needs such as transparency and VATs, and with @osb’s new information from meeting with OC, our group is leaning towards adopting OC.

@osb will put together a proposal for Thursday. Meeting notes here.

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Yes we do, so that’s $199 per year for the subscription plugin. We also use the plugin for dealing with EU VAT for digital services for $29/year.

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Hi All,
After some discussions in our “Organizational Operations - Payment processing” circle today we agreed to update the original Proposal to use Open Collective based on new findings, and to present this for approval at the All Hands meeting this coming Thursday.

Pia (CEO of OC) has offered to test their ‘contribution pricing’ (so far only offered to charities) to meet.coop as an experiment… it’s been working well for them so far and they are keen to explore if they can get off the 5% fees model. What this means is that Meet.coop would not be charged ANY fees by Open Collective - when a meet.coop customer checks out they would be asked for a contribution for OC. This defaults to 15%, but can be reduced to 10% or free - as per the attached “I don’t want to contribute”:

Screenshot 2020-07-14 at 12.29.39

If the customer offers to pay fees they are added on top - not taken off our prices.

So the new proposal is simply:

To set up a meet.coop Collective, under a fiscal host - and sell monthly or annual subscriptions there, to keep all accounting transparent.


Providing Fiscal hosting does require a bit of accounting… so, rather than take this on at The Open Co-op, I’m now proposing we talk to Platform 6 about being our fiscal host. They quote a 2% charge - but since we know them this could be less … plus, we need to decide if we want to charge VAT or not - and select a suitable fiscal host accordingly - see OC VAT page for more details of how they deal with VAT.

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I think we should also come up with a list of criteria for selecting a fiscal host. Here are my asks:

  • They charge no more than 5% fees, 2% even better, but I am happy to pay something > 0% because it’s work
  • They have TransferWise enabled and can pay invoices in any currency without incurring significant exchange rates
  • They have clear strategy on VAT (or other tax) responsibilities (I don’t want either us or our host to suddenly realize they are on the hook for a bunch of tax money at year-end)
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I have asked Pia the 3 Qs we need answers to RE:

  1. notification of failed payments
  2. receipts
  3. VAT

I have asked Platform 6:

  1. about their fees
  2. about VAT
  3. whether they have TransferWise set up

Will report back here if I hear back in time, or in the meeting tomorrow…
:slight_smile:

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answers from Pia at OC:

1 - Would we get notification of failed payments?
You won’t directly, apparently. We surface that information in the monthly collective report but you won’t get an immediate notification. I think our friends at Octobox, which implemented on open collective what you want to implement where using the API for fetching that automatically. I’ll ask them.

2 - Receipts are a feature. You can add as a host what you want to show in the receipts. Coming up feature you will be able to generate an invoice ahead of a donation.

3 - We include VAT in the receipt. If you have a host in EU (not sure UK) and you give anything against a donation you’ll have to include VAT


the lack of immediate notifications on failed payments is not a great imho … but maybe we can set up a Zap / other workaround…

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Personally I wouldn‘t feel super good with having an open collective fiscal host that is not a producer member of meet.coop. If I understand open collective correctly we would be quite depending on the fiscal host, e.g. In regards to approving expanses.

As mentioned yesterday in our call a lot of organizations probably need official and correct (including VAT etc.) invoices in order to send funds to meet.coop. So open collective probably will only be relevant for individuals?

I think I am not convinced yet that open collective is the right way to go, at least not for a general payment solution. Another and probably easier way and one we probably have to provide anyways (invoices, currencies etc.) would be to use the Bank accounts of the different producer members that a relevant for the specific user members and than distribute money (if needed) between those. What would arguments be against that solution and in favour of open collective? Just so that I can understand it better as I do not have any experience with open collective and I have only the informationen from their website.

@hng I think @osb got a clarifying response on that from Open Collective CEO, previous post.

open collective fiscal host that is not a producer member of meet.coop

@osb might you add that query to the list of things you’ve asked Platfrom 6?

from the open collective site:

Expenses go through a two-step approval process:
A core contributor (admin) of the individual Collective confirms that the expense is a valid use of funds for their project.
Then the host admin confirms that the expense meets requirements (such as having a valid receipt).
Then the expense can be paid out.

So, it is true we may need to wait for an admin of a Fiscal host to approve some payouts - but they are usually used to doing this, as it is part of the service they provide… so I don’t think this is a problem.

a lot of organizations probably need official and correct (including VAT etc.) invoices in order to send funds to meet.coop. So open collective probably will only be relevant for individuals?

Not really, no. We don’t know yet whether we want to charge VAT or not (I am strongly suggesting not - so we can get up and running quicker, then deal with VAT later if we need to.) but this is nothing to do with invoicing - we can create invoices however we want, with or without VAT, regardless of whether we use Open Collective or not.

Another and probably easier way and one we probably have to provide anyways (invoices, currencies etc.) would be to use the Bank accounts of the different producer members that a relevant for the specific user members and than distribute money (if needed) between those. What would arguments be against that solution and in favour of open collective?

The proposal to use OC aims to keep everything clear, transparent and in one place. Using a mix of bank accounts will get very complicated imho - and there will be no transparency… we will have to reconcile every payment in a spreadsheet… Open Collective provides several advantages over using separate bank accounts:

  1. We can take money as recurring payments via Open Collective (If we went the bank account route we would need to set up a separate payment gateway)
  2. Open Collective keeps all out transactions and accounting open and transparent
  3. Open Collective keeps our funds centralized - rather than having to bounce funds around between multiple bank accounts - which will get messy, have no transparency and also incur bank transfer fees
  4. Open Collective enables anyone (that we make Admin) to administer our accounts - rather than us relying on members of each co-op to do specific transactions which only they can do (because they are the only Admin of their bank account) i.e. it removes dependency.
  5. Using Open Collective builds a direct relationship between our customers and meet.coop (and OC, which is a great open source project, like meet.coop - and unlike a bank!) which is valuable from a marketing and customer relationship perspective. By comparison, invoicing via different co-ops will give customers the feeling they are contracting with a specific co-op, not meet.coop - maybe not a huge deal but may become so when we get bigger and more customers and demanding more customer service etc …

I hope this helps explain the rationale for using OC?

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Perhaps we can look at an example:

social.coop that runs a Mastodon instance and their OC Collective under Platform 6.

It’s nice to see who else is contributing and find friends and familiar names, as well as how the funds are being spent.

I see the relationship as similar to a payment processor. If we use Stripe for example, we also don’t have them as an Operational Member, and transfers out are still subject to their approval.

I think we should also think on how we will be using OC. I don’t expect Meet.coop to build up significant funds (like a reserve) in the bank account of Platform 6, as a lot of the money that comes in will go right out to pay for member labour through invoicing. I understand the concern where if the payout isn’t completely controlled by a member, it is hard to time payment, but this is where I feel we should pay 2% to Platform 6, so they can do their job right :slight_smile:

It’s also useful to note that if something goes bad, or for other reasons, we need to transfer out of Platform 6 (redirecting all recurring contributors), what is the pathway? This is a question to Open Collective, and from what I understand it isn’t easy at the moment.

I think we need more clarification for this. Is it up to us or up to the host (e.g. Platform 6) whether VAT applies or how invoices are structured?

I very strongly agree with this. I would be a block on a proposal that uses a mix of bank accounts.

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I get the arguments for using OC better now, thank you!

I still think OC may not be an option for some organizations. I can not really imagine the bookkeepers getting an account on OC and sending money to fiscal host that may not even be a member of meet.coop. And invoicing could become a hassle from my experience, but maybe this is a Germany/EU problem (e.g. invoices got to include a correct invoice number, the text has to describe correctly what was provided in which time frame, VAT etc. etc.). OC looks to be something like a crowdfunding platform.

Or is the plan to go full platform coop with some sort of “crowdfunding” throught OC? Which would be fine for me personally I guess, but I do not see a easy way to sell dedicated BBB servers to larger organizations through this.

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Personally I think it could be fine to just get started with using OC, I just cannot really imagine it being a general solution for everything financial in the future and that their will be problems, that’s why I’ve raised these points.

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Perhaps invite Platform 6 to join as contributor members in return for zero fees? (in recognition of the admin and accounting time it takes to be a host)

I just spoke to Graham (from Platform 6) about this… they’re keen on helping… but busy today… but may be able to join future meetings.
They don’t foresee any issues with delays with approving payments
Their 2% fee is “constantly under review” as they need to be sure they can cover their own costs, but they don’t foresee this changing anytime soon, and would give us a heads-up way in advance of any changes…
RE VAT - they are not VAT registered - and Graham agreed, this is not a problem right now as we simply need to crack on and get some funds in asap - we shouldn’t worry about VAT now… we can deal with it later if needs be…
RE Currencies - being hosted under Platform 6 would mean that meet.coop prices are shown in GBP £ but we can add explanatory text to clarify that these would be converted into the customers local currency (via Stripe) at checkout.

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our OC page is now set up at: https://opencollective.com/meet-coop
This still needs to be approved by Platform 6 - and I have emailed Pia and asked her to switch us over to the “contribution pricing” model she offered…
I have converted the service levels into £ from € - hope this is OK?
I have made Wouter, Chris, Mike and Ben Admins - does anyone else need / want to be Admin?
I think we can probably come up with better names for the tiers than “level 1 / 2 / 3” etc - which fit more with our branding / tone of voice… but we can do that later, once we have progressed the branding discussions.

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Great :smile: I don’t see myself as an admin on that site. Maybe that’s bcos the collective is still pending approval byPlatform 6?

Unable to conribute either - same reason?

Documented this in our #decisions:approved thread:

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was there a response to this? because we are having this problem right now. the oc invoices do not have invoice number or relevant tax information. we don’t know how to put the meet coop expenses in our accounting.

Can someone split this question/issue into a new thread? Tagging @benhylau @osb @wouter

Maybe Platform 6 can help here? @Graham

The discussion continues on the thread @baybars referenced. We should consider this side thread here closed, as P6 follows up in the other thread.