Fiscal Hosts FAQ

What is a Fiscal Host?

View our illustrated guide about fiscal hosts

Fiscal hosting enables Communities to transact financially without needing to legally incorporate. In other contexts, this is sometimes called fiscal sponsorship.

A fiscal host is a legal company or individual who holds a Community’s funds in their bank account and can generate invoices and receipts for supporters and sponsors. You can think of a fiscal host as an umbrella organization for the Communities in it.

The fiscal host is responsible for taxes, accounting, compliance, financial admin, and paying expenses approved by the Community’s core contributors (admins).

The Donate PR platform makes the job of fiscal hosts a lot easier by providing our software platform for tracking budgets and expenses, generating reports, and automating bookkeeping. Fiscal hosts have a dashboard where they can see their Communities and perform common actions.

By sharing a host, Communities are effectively mutualizing the cost and overhead of having a legal entity.

What are some examples of Fiscal Hosts?

Fiscal Hosts can be in any location and take any form of legal entity (as long as they have a bank account, PayPal account, and Stripe account). Each one determines its own policies for which Communities it will host and what fees it will charge.

Why are there different Fiscal Hosts?

We want to enable all kinds of diverse Communities, so we make our platform available to a network of fiscal hosts with different missions in different geographies. Each fiscal host determines its own policies and fees.

Some projects can’t be fiscally hosted by the entities Donate PR runs itself, because they are in a country we don’t cover or don’t fit under our entities' missions. For example, Open Source Community is only for Open Source software projects. So we welcome external hosts on the platform.

Do all Communities need a Fiscal Host?

Every Community that receives or pays out money needs a fiscal host because they need to connect the host's bank account, Stripe account, and PayPal account to activate DonatePR’s payment features. If you already have a legal company set up, or you are comfortable taking on the responsibility as an individual, you can create your own independent community. If not, you can join an existing host.

How do I find a Fiscal Host?

Go to the fiscal host's page and click “Apply”. You can see all hosts here.

If you already set up a profile for your community, you can also apply wtihin your Community's Settings -> Fiscal Host.

I'm interested in creating a Fiscal Host

Please see our documentation on becoming a Fiscal Host.