As part of our effort to encourage and support new and emerging cooperative projects we operate a fiscal host service using the excellent Open Collective platform. You can see our fiscal host page here. This service is designed to enable your new/emerging cooperative project to begin handling money in an open and transparent way, without needing to set up a bank account, or register a legal entity.

This lowers the angle of the on-ramp, making it quicker and simpler to set up a new cooperative project. You can use it to test whether your ideas can gain traction, you can use it to gather donations from early stage supporters, and build your crowd. As your project grows you can then set up a formal cooperative entity and get a business bank account as appropriate, but this service means that you can get going without all of that stuff slowing you down and getting in your way.

If you set up a collective on the Open Collective platform using our fiscal host service, the money that gets paid in to your collective goes into our bank account. It's our money. It's all recorded transparently on Open Collective, so everyone can see what's what. When you want to use some (or all) of the money that's been paid in, for example to cover meeting costs, or to purchase web hosting, you simply submit a claim, that gets approved by your collective, and assuming there are sufficient funds in your collective's budget, we pay out.