Starting conditions - open finance

Financial transparency was a journey of continuous improvement at Belong in Plymouth. Initially, the system was in constant flux, making it difficult for team members to follow. This challenge was compounded by the program itself evolving rapidly, causing frequent changes to financial numbers and allocations.
We discovered that financial literacy was an area of discomfort for many team members, requiring thoughtful approaches to making information accessible. At a really interesting and thoughtful session run by Matilde we each explored our personal relationship to money.
In response to lots of thought we shifted to a more group-based structure and the budget was redesigned to allocate funds to these groups rather than to specific line items, creating better alignment between financial resources and our group structure.
The final system combined two key tools: Airtable for displaying overall numbers and projections, and Open Collective for allocating money into specific "pots" tied to groups.
This approach allowed anyone associated with a particular area of work to see their available budget. Howver even then implementation wasn't straightforward—Lottery funding came in smaller increments that couldn't all be represented in Open Collective at once.
There was also a sense that once allocated to a group it then became 'their' money.
If we had longer, managing the money and balancing the group needs and overall programme needs would have been an important area of discussion.