FAQ
Fiscal hosting enables Projects 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 Project’s funds in their bank account, and can generate invoices and receipts for backers and sponsors. You can think of a fiscal host as an umbrella organization for the Projects in it.
The fiscal host is responsible for taxes, accounting, compliance, financial admin, and paying expenses approved by the Project’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 Projects and perform common actions.
By sharing a host, Projects are effectively mutualizing the cost and overhead of having a legal entity.
We want to enable all kinds of diverse Projects, 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 Project is only for Open Source software projects, and Open Source Foundation is for US-only charity projects.
Every Project 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 Donate PR’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 fiscally host your own Project.