Cycle Eight Reflection 

• Improving the dashboard contribution tool to better represent recurring contributions (based on the last date they were charged).

• A new expense-editing experience. The current (initial) effort is focused on UX, but it is a first step in a broader campaign to:
  • Provide the ability to edit separate parts of an expense (without going through the entire expense submission process).
  • Auditing changes that have been made to expenses after they’ve been submitted and before they’ve been paid.
  • Preventing unauthorized changes to expenses that have already been approved. 
  • Enabling fiscal hosts to better communicate with expense submitters around incomplete expenses by pointing to what part of the expense needs to be modified. 

• We adjusted the social sharing links on the contribution success page. We now automatically fetch the collective's social links and only add a share button for services for which the collective has an account. We also added support for Bluesky, Linked and Threads. 

Cycle One Overview 

• Transaction Reports: last year, we launched new transaction reports (built primarily for Fiscal Hosts but also available for Collectives). The new statements are directly bound to their underlying transactions in order to make the ledger clearer, verifiable, and trustworthy. Until the end of 2024, we were still sending hosts monthly email reports that were not as clear and reliable as the new ones. So, to mark the fresh start of 2025, we will fully release the new transaction statements, deprecate the old ones, and continue sending monthly emails directing hosts to the new reports.

• Contributor Address Collection: Based on feedback from hosts doing end-of-year tax reporting, we are improving contributor address collection. Fiscal Hosts can set a threshold for total contributions in a fiscal year. Contributors that pass that threshold (or that we anticipate may pass that threshold due to recurring contributions) will be prompted to enter their address information. This information will then be made available to hosts in the transactions export.

• Connected Bank Accounts: Following positive feedback, we are continuing to invest in a tool that enables hosts to connect their bank accounts to reconcile new transactions with the platform. This tool is still in MVP mode, and we are working on functional enhancements and a comprehensive design review.

• New Expense Submission: After a round of internal testing and feedback, we are making another pass of refinements to the new expense submission flow with the intention of a beta release by the end of the cycle.
  

  

• Payout Methods: We have long had a payment methods management settings screen. We are expanding it to cover both payment methods (used for contributions) and payout methods (used for getting paid via expenses). Currently, payout methods are only accessible in the expense submission flow, and that is something we wish to improve.

We are also conducting two research efforts:

• Comment Threads: We’ve been enhancing and expanding the role of comment threads in the platform dashboard experience. We are now considering additional improvements to the comment thread infrastructure and approaching the potential for introducing in-app notifications based on the state of comment threads. Before taking these next steps, we are conducing an engineering assessment about how we wish to approach this. We now need to decide if we advance by utilizing external libraries (and/or service providers) or investing in custom code. 

• Sidebar reorganization: a possible reorganization of the dashboard sidebar to better reflect and discern between organization and host tools.