Updating the Expense Submission documents

It's not quite clear to me yet whether a formal invoice is necessary. @andrewe you mentioned this; can you confirm with P6 whether that is needed?

@Nathan Schneider Open Collective expense form (built-in invoice feature) is sufficient for social‍.coop process and approval. I will leave it to P6 @Graham to let us know if an attached invoice (directed to social‍.coop c/o P6 etc.) is necessary for their financial oversight and approval.

thanks @andrewe

@graham2 Can you helps us identify a) whether an invoice to P6 is necessary, and what the exact specifications of that invoice should be?

My apologies to @Graham for the incorrect tag!

@Nathan Schneider @Andrew Escobar (Andres) · social.coop Finance Working Group This is what is currently written in our Expense policy statement on OC:
"To claim expenses for your collective you'll need to provide evidence. For small items, up to a value of £20, you'll need to provide a receipt. For larger items of expenditure you should provide an invoice from the supplier.

We prefer to make payments via bank transfer, so please choose this option when you submit a claim if possible.

If you've got any queries or want to clarify what we're going to need in order to approve any planned expenses that might be out of the ordinary, please get in touch."

I think for the time being at least this holds true.

@Graham @Nathan Schneider Sorry for the confusion. I was wondering if expense claims for stipends required a separate PDF invoice directed to P6 (for audit).

As it turns out, all Open Collective expense claims — both those using the built-in invoice feature and those attaching a custom invoice — generate a (somewhat hidden) PDF invoice that lists the fiscal host:

Bill to: Platform 6 Development Cooperative

example expense/invoice ⇢ More Actions ⇢ Download

@andrewe @graham2 Thanks for all this. We should definitely be sure to align the P6 and Social.coop expense submission policies.
I think the P6 one isn't quite right, as a receipt will not be possible for stipends, which will often be over 20 GBP.
Graham, what do you think of our proposed guidelines here?
I've just added P6's preference for direct deposit.
Once this document is all ready, could we synchronize it between both OC and the SC wiki?

I made a few copy edits but nothing that takes this in a different direction. Also clarified that a single member of FWG can approve expense within the approved budget, and that other decisions may require approval from collective FWG or the membership.

I love the rewrite of it. Thank you for taking this next step, @Nathan Schneider

I propose an edit that justifies the stipend. We can explain what a stipend is and why it is relevant to Social.Coop. Some people do not understand this idea. Some people feel that they are exceptional and that they deserve more or less than other people due to their effort or skills or their perceived time-value. Some people think it is stupid to have a stipend at all because, as an individual, they may already earn $850/hour in consulting fees outside their regular $500,000 annual salary with benefits; thus, from their point of view, the stipend is nothing to them; it is nothing to others; it is not worth the time to discuss it. In fact, someone in such a position said something like these words out loud to me recently. Conversely, to mention Matt Noyes (because he is so good natured and has already spoken about money over public Loomio threads)... a stipend would be meaningful to him, he said, because he is on a limited income, even though his stipend amount would pale in comparison to either his annual contribution to Social.Coop or to his labor value if he were salaried, given that he volunteers so much time here. And, still other people have objected to the stipend because of their extra effort to figure out how to report it for tax purposes. A tax-free stipend might be accomplished through the purchase of gift cards, for example, as a gift to volunteers, or skill-sharing services among ourselves, and I wonder how we would operationalize some alternative stipend. ... I've written a lot here, and I am going to look at the document text and see what additional text could be added concisely. Or: maybe some multi-sentence statement could be linked there or, better, perhaps, included in another page on Working Group stipends.

If we want to have stipends for Working Groups, then we have to overcome many people's aversion to talking about money and getting paid, at least for the Americans (who learn this aversion to avoid discussing their economic inequalities). We have to set up Working Group volunteers with the primary understanding that everyone in the group will send an invoice for an equal share of the amount allocated for their official members, and that the Working Group can decide how to allocate their stipend funds, provided that they update the FWG about their decisions. ... and we return to the problem of defining group membership: Each Working Group must have official members for stipends to be paid out.