Catalyst Circle Treasury Management

The Team

Chris Keller - https://www.linkedin.com/in/racedriver/

Miroslav Rajh - https://www.linkedin.com/in/miroslav-rajh-94566845/

André Diamond - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andr%C3%A9-diamond-45871242/

Background

The Catalyst Circle (CC) Treasury is an emergent body that is being formed to help manage and allocate the funding of the Catalyst Circle and CC Admin Team, in an open and transparent manner. As the Catalyst Circle continues to grow and expand, so too must the operations that are necessary to support it: This is where the CC Treasury comes in. We are a group of committed members from the Catalyst Community who stepped up to fulfill this role after hearing about it at the Catalyst Town Halls. 

In order to be sustainable these community bodies have been obtaining funding to fulfil their roles, responsibilities, and functions. However, there is currently no system in place that allows them to manage their financial operations and obligations in a simple and clear manner. We believe that by developing and implementing a treasury management system we can help these community initiatives ensure that money provided by Catalyst is spent in a manner that is auditable and transparent. CC Treasury will manage Fund 6 CC Funded proposal "Power up the Catalyst Circle" and future proposal funds that need management from CC Treasury includes the following.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Catalyst-Circle-Funding-Mechanism/384249-48088

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/CC-Admin-Team-Scope-Expansion/384245-48088

Over the next few months the CC Treasury Team will address the following tasks and objectives:

• Pay operating expenses. New expenses have to be vetted into a pre-approved list.
• Pay Circle members for duties performed.
• Each fund the data will be archived to backtrack and compare to future funds.
• Build a bookkeeping system to document all incoming and outgoing ADA.
• Manage, maintain, update and improve the bookkeeping system to make the Circle operate efficiently and transparently as the Circle grows and evolves.
• Build, update and maintain documentation to guide future treasurers.
• Start working on a long term plan to make payments autonomous. This will involve smart contracts and NFTs. (Future treasurers will continue to refine and maintain this once it's finished) Will need to hire developers in the future to build this.

Impact

This vital role in keeping the money awarded transparent, appropriate, and prompt for the Catalyst circle and beyond. To develop a trusted approval system of forms to request and invoice funds, ledger, and display in a clear and adoptable fashion. 

Feasibility

Level one will be finished by the team. The solution will have multiple layers of adoption while scaling with Cardano features. Short term the tests have been going well and additional tools can be built to read awards and ledger data moving forward. The team will be requesting additional talents/funds in the future to make use of data for additional transparency for the community. Underlying features are currently testing well. 

Auditability

The system that is being built will be open source and available for the community to use elsewhere.  The onboarding documentation for future treasurers will be public as well as part of the CC github Playbook.

Adjustability

Our plan has room to expand, grow, and adapt as the environment changes. The team may scale but currently testing the limits and growth potential. Current standings find the plan to be easy, adaptable, and repeatable. There will be experimentation with additional automations as growth and uses progress.

Roadmap with Milestones/KPIs

• Complete bookkeeping system base by 12 Dec 2021
• Complete Documentation for future treasurers by end of Fund 7
• Manage and document transactions from now till the end of Fund 7.
• Update and finalize the Bookkeeping system at the end of Fund 7.
• Archive Fund 7 and create Fund 8 documents for new treasurers. (end of Fund 7)

Budget breakdown

• Build accounting system from scratch - $400
• Build documentation for future treasurers - $200
• 10 hours per week for 3 months = 120hours @ $30/h = $3600 x 3 team members = $10800