When we make payments

The Social Change Nest acts as a host to over 200 groups. You can imagine that means a lot of admin to make everyone's payments. In order to keep this as efficient as possible we have a specific process we use to pay expenses once they've been approved.

Payment dates

Our finance team make all the payments three times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The payments are usually made by 1pm those days and will include any expense that has been been approved by your admin, as long as you have enough funds in your page for it. Due to the volume of transactions we have to process, we're not really able to do this any faster but we do clear all the approved expenses each time. If you have an urgent payment request, we recommend submitting it on a Sunday, Tuesday or Thursday and making sure an admin approves it straight away. That way it will be paid the following day.

When you don't have enough funds

If you don't have the funds to cover an expense, Open Collective won't even let us mark it as paid and we will not be able to honour it. Whilst it is possible to approve an expense before you have to money to cover it, we really don't recommend this. It's important to manage expectations in your community, especially if you're making emergency solidarity payments to vulnerable people. If you don't have the money to cover expenses it's usually best to talk to people in your community and explain the situation. We always do our best to support collective admins in these situations but, ultimately, the responsibility is yours to communicate this to your community.