Development – Cycle Seven Reflection and Cycle Eight Overview

Cycle Seven Reflection 

• We expanded the off-platform transactions tool, and fiscal hosts can now connect directly to their bank accounts (bypassing the need to manually import files). This tool is now in testing with OFiCo’s founding members, and the initial feedback is promising. We are currently assimilating some feedback and planning follow-up work. 

• A side-effect from the off-platform transactions tool is that host admins can now easily document on the platform expenses that have been paid off-platform (for example: via direct bank transfers). You no longer need to go through the entire expense submission flow to do this. Instead, go to the Hosted Collectives tool, find the collective, click on the context menu and there you will see a new option to “add an expense”:

1. An expense will be created 
2. It will automatically be marked as paid and debited from the collective budget. 
3. It will NOT require collective approval  
4. It will not show up as an expense that needs to be paid.

• We’ve released a tool for exporting hosted collectives. Hosts can now filter collectives and export diverse information about the collectives history including financial, expense and contribution statistics.

1. We kept in mind first-time or infrequent expense submitters who may not be familiar with accounting vocabulary (such as invoices and receipts). 
2. We’ve also kept in mind recurring expense submitters, and the flow now loads with defaults, which should make expense submission faster and clearer.
3. Fiscal hosts can now (see settings→policies in your host dashboard) add more detailed instructions for expense submitters, including guidance about invoices, receipts, and expense titles. 
4. Collective admins can also (see settings→policies in your collective dashboard) add detailed instructions for expense submitters, including guidance about invoices, receipts, and expense titles.
5. Instructions show up in the expense submission flow in order to guide expense submitters about how to correctly submit expenses and increase the odds of the expense being paid.
6. We’ve introduced some security checks into the expense submission flow itself. Expense submitters who are missing a legal name will be prompted to enter one. Expense submitters will also be prompted to resolve situations where their legal name differs from the name in their selected payout method. This should reduce the number of expenses that require back-and-forth communication with the fiscal host before they can be paid.
7.  … and many more (too many to list) tweaks to improve, clarify, and transform expense submission into a clearer, more confidence-inducing experience. 

• We’ve added an “Internal transfer” tool within the accounts tool. This makes it simple and intuitive to transfer funds between your collective accounts. This functionality is still bundled into the crowdfunding redesign preview feature, so if you want to give it a try, make sure to turn it on.

• Our attempt to improve goals was only partially successful (though no changes have been released). During the project, we encountered some complex choices regarding how goals should be defined and how progress should be measured. Some of the questions have been resolved, and we’ve made some infrastructure improvements accordingly. However, some questions have not yet been determined, and more work will be required before we can make further progress. We continue to research this in the background and will resume work as soon as possible.

Cycle Eight Overview 

• Improving the dashboard contribution tool to better represent recurring contributions (based on the last date they were charged).
• A new expense-editing experience. The current (initial) effort is focused on UX but it is a first step in a broader campaign to:

1. Provide the ability to edit separate parts of an expense (without having to go through the entire expense submission process).
2. Auditing changes that have been made to expenses after they’ve been submitted and before they’ve been paid.
3. Preventing unauthorized changes to expenses that have already been approved. 
4. Enabling fiscal hosts to better communicate with expense submitters around incomplete expenses by pointing to what part of the expense needs to be modified.