Michael, Since I currently handle most of the financial details for the Conservancy, I answered some your questions below (the conservancy@ address goes to both me and Karen). I've left one of the questions to Karen. Michael Cummings writes: > a. What happens to our existing bank account, paypal account, and > cafepress account? Speaking non-legally (IANAL), they become assets of the Conservancy, earmarked for the Gentoo project. They could be spun out of the Conservancy if Gentoo decides to leave the Conservancy and sets up another 501(c)(3) non-profit. We'd suggest closing the bank account so that we can open one for Gentoo at our bank. We keep all the project earmarked accounts in one place, and this makes it easier for us to manage the finances for you. For the Paypal account, it would be set up to transfer the money into the Gentoo bank account at the Conservancy. Although, we'd actually prefer that the Paypal account be shutdown if possible and set up an address at the Conservancy's Paypal account. However, this means that the email address used for people to send money to the Paypal account would have to change. This has been a problem for some projects. I am not sure how we'd handle the Cafepress account, as we've never handled one of those before, but it could probably be configured in a similar way. We'll work with you find a reasonable solution. > b. How involved is the process of spending money? > In this kind of dire circumstance, currently this process is rushed so > that within a day of discovery the part has been ordered and paid > for. How does this work with the fiscal workings falling under the > Conservancy? We'd recommend in this situation that someone from the project use their personal credit card or other financial instrument, and then submit a reimbursement request with a receipt to the Conservancy. We can't turn around payments in 24 hours, but we typically process reimbursement requests within two weeks. (We do processing once per week, so the most you'd usually have to wait is two weeks.) > Can you walk us through the normal procedure for handling these more > doldrum scenarios as well? Currently, you just send an email to with a receipt and/or invoice attached and a brief note describing what the expense is for. If we have any questions pursuant to our due diligence for making sure the expense fits the 501(c)(3) status of the Conservancy, we send them to you. Once the questions are answered (or if there are no questions), we send a check either directly to the vendor, or, in the case of a reimbursement request, to the project contributor who made the original expense. We can also wire money to vendors/individuals, but this incurs fees for the project so we try to avoid it. > 2. Outstanding liabilities. In reference to paragraph 7, we don't have a > current filing. Our income used to be below the cutoff that required a > non-profit to file, though we're not sure if that's still true or not. I'll leave this one for Karen. -- Bradley M. Kuhn President, Software Freedom Conservancy