Reviewing Expenses as an Admin

What to know if you're an admin of an Open Source Collective hosted member project

As an admin of an Open Source Collective (OSC) hosted project, you are responsible for reviewing and approving expenses before they are sent to and paid through OSC. In this page we'll review reviewing expenses and things to keep in mind. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out — we are here to make this as simple as possible for your project!

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Admin Responsibilities in Expense Review

• Verify the legitimacy of the expense — ensure it aligns with your open source project

• Check for duplicate submissions — make sure it's a unique expense and hasn't already been submitted and paid

• Confirm sufficient documentation — ensure expenses contain all required information

• Approve only allowable expenses — no personal, prepayments, or non-open source payments are allowed

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Steps to Review an Expense

When reviewing an expense, follow these steps:

1. Confirm Expense Eligibility

• is this a legitimate expense?

  • ensure it's not spam

• does this expense directly support your project?

• is it allowable?

  • OSC cannot process personal expenses or prepayments

1. Verify Required Documentation

• is all supporting documentation on the expense?

1. Approve or Request Changes

• If the expense looks good, click approve

• If something is missing or incorrect, leave a comment

• If the expense isn't valid and seems to be spam, mark it as spam

1. OSC Review and Payment Processing

• Once approved by an admin, the expense will be sent to OSC's "ready to pay" queue. We will:

  • Conduct a final compliance review

  • Reach out to payee or the admin if any additional information is required

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Common Issues to Watch For

Some common expense issues to pay attention to when reviewing expenses are:

• duplicated expenses or expenses that payees submit twice

• reimbursements that are missing receipts

• invoices that are missing timeframes

• invoices that don't clearly expain what work was complete

• expenses that do not align with our guidelines.

👉 Review our Invoice vs. Reimbursement guide here to learn about the differences and what each require.

👉 Review our expense policies and limitations to learn more about what funds can and cannot be used for.

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When Does OSC Process Payments?

The OSC team processes payments twice per week — Tuesdays and Thursdays. To keep things running smoothly, we review and process expenses within a set timeframe on those days. We do not process expenses outside of this particular schedule.