FIRST Worlds

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The HCB team just got back from the FIRST Robotics Championship in Houston a few days ago, and it was a blast! We had a great time connecting with teams and sharing more about what we do. For context, HCB supports nearly 2,000 FIRST teams, with the number growing by the day.

Changelog

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Features

↕️ Sort your invoices

Your invoices page just got a lot easier to scan. You can now sort invoices by clicking the table headers. Read more...

🔔 Toggle monthly donation and follower summary emails

From your notification settings, you can now toggle whether you receive monthly donation and follower summary emails. Read more...

🔔 Get notified when important settings change

HCB will now send an email to all team members of an organization when transparency mode or monthly announcements are enabled or disabled. We hope this helps you keep your team in the loop! Read more...

Small Improvements

• All items in the command bar now match the icons and order of the items in the left-side navigation. (#13265)

  

  Luke Oldenburg, Engineer

• The "Generate" and "Disable TOTP" actions now appear as buttons instead of plain text. (#13381)

  

  Luke Oldenburg, Engineer

• The agreement signing page for teen applications to HCB is now clearer about the application process. (#13456)

  

  Samuel, Engineer

• The "Have you applied for fiscal sponsorship with HCB in the past?" question in the HCB application is now prefilled from our data. (#13457)

  

  Samuel, Engineer

• The team member invite modal now specifies that members can view transactions and finances. (#13522)

  

  Manu Gurudath, Engineer

• The application review page is now clearer about why an application may not be ready to submit. (#13542)

  

  Samuel, Engineer

• CSV transaction exports now include the amount in both cents and dollars. (#13592)

  

  Anish, Operations

Bugfixes

• Pressing "Sign out everywhere else" now only updates currently signed-in sessions. Previously, it would incorrectly update the timestamp on already-expired sessions. (#13375)

  

  Luke Oldenburg, Engineer

• The donations one-pager is now hidden whenever any donations exist, one-time or recurring. Previously, if you only had recurring donations, the one-pager would still appear and you couldn't view them. (#13384)

  

  Luke Oldenburg, Engineer

• Card names are now shown on the My cards page. Previously, only card grant purposes were visible here. (#13410)

  

  Luke Oldenburg, Engineer

• The donation goal reached and invite accepted emails are now clearer about who can create an announcement. (#13444)

  

  Samuel, Engineer

• Hover contrast on orange buttons in dark mode is now fixed. (#13523)

  

  Manu Gurudath, Engineer

• If all of your applications have been archived, HCB will now redirect you to the new application page instead of an archived one. (#13536)

  

  Samuel, Engineer

This wraps up our updates for this month. Be sure to check back next month for the June edition! If you ever have any ideas on how we can improve HCB, I'd love to hear them! Feel free to reach out at hcb@hackclub.com.

All the best,

Gary & the HCB Team

Your invoices page just got a lot easier to scan. You can now sort invoices by clicking the table headers.

Click the same column again to switch between ascending and descending order, so it is easier to find the oldest invoice, the largest one, or group similar statuses together at a glance.

We're starting with invoices first, and we plan to bring the same sorting controls to more parts of HCB soon!

You can now toggle whether you receive monthly donation and follower summary emails from your notification settings. These toggles apply to all organizations you are a member of, and only affect your own account. More customization coming soon!

On HCB, any organization manager can update the organization's settings. Organization settings range from minor things, such as a new donation page message, to major things, such as whether or not transparency mode is enabled.

When a major setting is updated, we want to make sure everyone knows what changed and what it means for the organization. HCB will now send an email to all team members of an organization when transparency mode or monthly announcements are enabled or disabled.

We hope this helps you keep your team in the loop!

One unified navigation, everywhere

We used to have two separate navigation systems for desktop and mobile, which caused inconsistencies and bugs.

Now there's just one. It shows as a sidebar on desktop, and gracefully slides in as a drawer on mobile. 💫

We rebuilt the transfer experience from the ground up.

Clear sections, plain labels, and a dynamic table of contents that follows your scroll. Every detail — animations, validation, timing — was deliberate.

Check transfers in particular: just try it.

We've re-written our interface to make managing your organization's finances more intuitive than ever.

• 🎨 We've refreshed our colors and icons for a modern experience.
• 🔍 Menus are now organized the same way on mobile and desktop, so you always know where to find things.
• 💬 We listened to your feedback and improved everything from transactions to settings pages.

Don't worry – everything you rely on is still here. We've just made them easier to use and nicer to look at. This redesign was built with your experience in mind, and we're always looking to improve. If you have thoughts, suggestions, or just want to let us know what you think, please reach out!

Remember when logging into HCB just showed you a list of transactions? Yeah, we thought that could be better.

Introducing the new HCB Home – your command center for everything happening in your organization.

• 📊 Know exactly where you stand the moment you log in, complete with a visual graph showing your balance over time.
• ⏰ See latest activity, right on the home page. No more hunting through settings to see what just happened.
• 🚀 See what your team is up to in real-time. Transfers, comments, and updates all in one place.
• 🙏🏼 Avatars showing who's part of your organization, plus key stats like total revenue.
• 💸 Transfer money, get reimbursed, deposit checks, and more – all accessible from the top of your dashboard.

HCB's mission is to provide an accessible financial toolkit for nonprofit projects, so we want to make it easy to invite collaborators. Previously, you needed to know every collaborator's email address to add them on HCB.

Starting today, it's easier than ever to add members to your organization: just share a link! The new layout combines email invites and our new invite links into a single modal.

With the new invite links, you can now share them with customizable expiration dates and revoke whenever you need to. We hope these changes make it easier to work together with your team on HCB. Let us know what you think!

We're incredibly excited to announce HCB Mobile, our official mobile app for iOS and Android! After more than a year of development, we're bringing the power of HCB to your pocket, making it easier than ever to manage your HCB organization's finances on the go.

No matter where you are, HCB Mobile has you covered with the ability to track your organization's finances, manage cards, upload receipts, and collect in-person donations.

Features

• 📈 Track your organization's finances: See your organization's balance and transactions at a glance.

• 💰 Accept donations in-person: You can accept tap-to-pay donations directly on your device, perfect for an in-person fundraiser or event! No extra hardware required.

• 💳 Manage your cards: Issue new cards, add them to Apple / Google Wallet, and freeze or cancel them directly from your phone!

• 🧾 Upload receipts the easy way: Never lose another receipt! Upload photos directly from your device or match existing receipts in your Receipt Bin to transactions with a tap.

Download now

HCB Mobile is available now on the App Store and Google Play Store. If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us at hcb@hackclub.com.

Open source

We're open source on GitHub! (give us a hand and ⭐ the repo!)

The app is built on Expo, a React Native framework that streamlines development and deployment across platforms, alongside libraries and SDKs such as SWR, Sentry, and Stripe that power key features.

v4 API

Before building app features, though, we needed a robust API on HCB itself. Over several months, we expanded our v4 API to support functionality like creating cards, managing receipts, and inviting users to HCB organizations.

The API improvements we implemented are what made HCB mobile possible. More than that, they'll allow us to iterate and build smoothly for future integrations and automations, meaning we'll be able to improve HCB for all users faster than ever before. Once the foundation of the API was in place, the next hurdle was to overcome the obstacles of both the Android and iOS ecosystems.

Entitlement Permissions

One of the biggest challenges we had to overcome while implementing the app was getting permissions to use advanced native features such as Tap to Pay (for in person donations) and Push Provisioning (for adding your card to your digital wallet). Securing these entitlements took months of back-and-forth emails, test case recordings, and in-depth compliance checks. For Apple, we first needed to get the development entitlement, build the feature, and comply with their extensive requirements list. For the Android version of our app, we created a Google Pay & Wallet console organization, signed 3-4 NDAs, a CTA, completed identity verification, obtained a private SDK, and submitted a user flow. After all of that, we were finally able to get our app whitelisted. On top of this, we needed to liaise with Stripe the whole time because their SDK powers the Tap to Pay and Push Provisioning features.

OTA Updates

Even after securing entitlements, we still had to deal with another major obstacle: the traditionally slow app release cycle. Any minor fix required publishing a new build, which was time-consuming (and can turn your Mac into a grilled cheese maker). After dealing with this for a while, we adopted the model of OTA (Over the Air) updates. This allowed us to remotely trigger updates without needing a new app build. Conveniently, Expo offers this solution in their EAS Updates service. We setup a Github Action to publish a new OTA update on every commit to the main branch, allowing us to have continuous deployment. The diagram below shows a basic overview of how this is possible.

After over 250 hours of development work and the help of Caleb, I can say that I'm incredibly proud of HCB Mobile because it's built by teenagers to make it easier for teenagers to run nonprofit organizations and projects with HCB.

HCB has a few ways for you to upload receipts for your transactions: on the website, text messages, and email. When going through your emails, it can be difficult to remember if you've already uploaded a receipt. 🤔

To help you out, we've added a small indicator to emails that automatically updates with the status of your transaction. If you've already uploaded a receipt, you'll see a green indicator letting you know, and if not, you'll see a red button that links directly to the receipt upload page!

We hope this helps you with uploading your receipts!

Are you part of a robotics team or Hack Club? Did you know you can now add an affiliation to your organizations? It's as simple as going to your organization settings! Currently, the options include FIRST, VEX, and Hack Club.

Adding an affiliation isn’t just for show—it can unlock special perks such as fee waivers and giveaways!

Head over to your event settings today and see what your affiliation can do!

Last year, HCB launched wire transfers, a built-in way to send money internationally from HCB. Today, we're excited to announce a new international payment method: Wise.

What is Wise?

Wise is a payment processor that allows you to send money in over 40 currencies. They offer transparent exchange rates and no minimums. This makes Wise a great option for small-value international payments. You can learn more about Wise on their website.

Reimbursing via Wise

You can now also add Wise as a reimbursement payout method! Head over to your payout settings on HCB to add Wise as a payout method.

Fees with Wise

HCB never charges fees for transfers or reimbursements. However, Wise charges a fee for transfers processed through their network that varies based on the amount and destination of the transfer.

In HCB, you can see just how much each transfer or reimbursement will cost you to send:

We're so happy that Wise is now generally available on HCB—we know it'll make sending money easier for many of our international users. If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us at hcb@hackclub.com.

A few months ago, we launched organization announcements to help you keep your followers in the loop about your organization whenever you have an update.

Now, you can also enable monthly announcements in your organization settings to let HCB automatically generate a new announcement each month. By default, each announcement includes summarized data about your organization from the past month, such as donations and spending analyses, but you can edit the announcement to include whatever you'd like.

With monthly announcements, HCB will help you build your community by keeping fans and donors informed, while you focus on making your organization awesome! ✨

Our team is always looking for new ways to help you understand and manage your finances. We've heard from many school clubs and robotics teams that they spend a lot of time on Discord, so we thought: why not bring HCB to Discord?

Starting today, you can use the HCB Discord bot to check your balance, view recent transactions, and even get notified of organization activity right in your Discord server. You can also upload missing receipts and open reimbursement reports with convenient commands.

Here's how it works:

1. Invite the HCB bot to your Discord server at hcb.gg/discord.

   

2. Set up the bot with your HCB organization using the /setup command.

   

3. Use commands like /balance and /transactions to interact with your HCB account and get notified of new activity.

   

We're hoping this new integration will make it easier for organizers to stay on top of their finances while providing transparency to community members. If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us at hcb@hackclub.com—we're still adding features to the bot, and we'd love to hear your ideas.

Looking for a way to make sure you can never get locked out of HCB? You can now generate 10 backup codes for your account:

Keep them safe and secure because backup codes can be used to replace any authentication method during the login process. If you have 2FA enabled, you'll still need another authentication factor in addition to your backup code.

Organizations on HCB do so much and raise a ton of money through donations! Yet, donors and other people interested in your mission are often left out of the loop.

We've launched Organization Announcements to help you send out announcements to people who want to stay up to date with your organization! This includes donors and anyone else who wants to follow you.

You'll now be able to:

• 👥 Have people follow your organization with the Follow button located on your Transactions and Announcements pages
• 📣 Send out announcements using a rich-text editor and blocks that include data from HCB
• 🗒️ See announcements on the new Feed page, and receive them in your email inbox.

Announcements are automatically enabled for transparent organizations. If your organization is not in Transparency Mode, you can still post announcements and get followers by sharing a link to your announcements page. For non-transparent organizations, your announcements page will not be publicly accessible until you publish your first announcement.

Want to try it out? HCB has already published their first announcement, so go follow us at hcb.hackclub.com/bank/announcements!

Earlier this year, we launched donation goals to help you set clear targets for your fundraising efforts. Now, you'll also get email updates on your progress towards your donation goals, in addition to being able to see your progress on your donations page.

If you have donation goals enabled, which you can configure in your organization settings, your monthly donation summaries will include your progress towards your donation goals.

Your team will also now get an email once you hit your donation goal!

Ever wanted to give your donors more structure without adding friction? We just shipped the first version of Donation Tiers - a simple way for orgs to offer preset giving levels like "$5/month – Supporter" or "$20/month – Champion."

It’s optional, totally customizable, and shows up right on your public donation page.

This lays the groundwork for future perks (👀 exclusive newsletters?) and makes giving feel more personal - which means more recurring support for the mission you care about.

Enable the feature preview in your org's settings and let us know what you think!

Is your organization's ledger cluttered with what seems like an endless cave of transactions? Travel, food, supplies, and subscriptions are all together in one list. If only there was a way to group transactions together...

A few years ago, we launched transaction tags as a feature preview to solve this problem. Now, we're officially launching transaction tags for everyone! You'll be able to create tags and add as many as you wish to any transactions in your organization.

We've also made some new improvements to tags if you've been using the feature preview:

• 🤪 Tags now have emojis! Existing tags have been automatically matched with an emoji, using AI
• ⚙️ There's also now a tab in your organization's settings page where you can create, update, rename, and delete any tag

Hopefully this will help you clean up your ledger - happy HCBing!

We've just rolled out a fresh new look for our invoice UI! It’s cleaner, more intuitive, and designed to make sending invoices faster and easier than ever. We're continuing to improve every corner of the platform, so stay tuned for even more updates soon.

From running an event to fighting world hunger, there's one thing that all organizations on HCB have in common: raising money! It's easy to get caught up in running your nonprofit organization and helpful to take a step back to see the progress you've made each month.

In May, we sent out the first donation summary to all members of organizations that received at least one donation in April. HCB will continue to send out these summaries on the first of each month. We hope this summary will help you to better see your progress towards the goals of your organizations!

We will be performing a scheduled database migration on May 7th, 2025 at 1 am PT. It is expected for this maintenance to last half an hour.

You will not be able to access your account and card transactions will decline during this time.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at hcb@hackclub.com

Last night we open-sourced HCB! It's been a long journey taking a seven-year old codebase from private to public. Check it out and star it here: github.com/hackclub/hcb.

Here’s how we did it.

Scrubbing

HCB began as a private repository with the intention of open sourcing one day. With it being private, the repository collected amounts of customer data / personally identifiable data (PII). Over time, with bug reports, etc., we posted highly sensitive information across GitHub issues, pull requests, and commits.

We had nearly 5,000 issues & PRs which could potentially contain this information. We attempted to automate this process with Regex, but it was difficult to cover edge cases such as PII within images. Our solution was to hire a team of “scrubbers” who would go through the repository and flag any sensitive content. We assigned every scrubber a block of hundred issues / PRs; once finished they could claim a new block of issues and PRs. Within fifteen days - the entire repository's Issues and Pull Requests were scrubbed of customer data and PII.

The scrubbers ended up identifying 170 instances of sensitive information in the repository. I then took that list, updated the GitHub comments to remove those instances, and reached out to GitHub support (thank you Fred!) to remove the images from GitHub servers and the edit history from their database.

Credentials w/ Doppler

Our next concern was our credentials. Don’t worry, we hadn’t been storing our .env in the repository. We were using Rails’ encrypted credentials system. It’s decent, however, we were concerned that if our key leaked, everything would be leaked with no option for remediation. With that in mind, we transitioned to storing our credentials with Doppler and built a custom module to load the credentials into the Rails processes' environment. Some benefits of using Doppler: more flexibility with environments (we have developers with different levels of access), audit logs, and convenient changes (without refreshing GitHub branches). The module also supported overriding Doppler variables for specific environments using an ignored .env. For developers without Doppler access, this is also the system for setting environment variables.

Git rewrite

We didn’t commit our .env file but there were some files with secrets exposed in them. To identify these secrets we used git log on a couple of strings we’d identified as critical (eg. bank account numbers):

git log -S [SECRET]

We also used grab/secret-scanner and trufflesecurity/trufflehog to scan for any other potential secrets in our codebase.

After identifying these files / strings, we used git-filter-repo to remove them. We ran these commands in a GitHub codespace to have as clean of a setup as possible.

To remove an entire file we used:

python3 git-filter-repo.py --sensitive-data-removal --path [file_path] --invert-paths

And to redact a string we used:

python3 git-filter-repo.py --sensitive-data-removal --replace-text <(echo 'STRING==>REDACTED') --force

We then force pushed to our repository. For this to have any meaning, we had to unfortunately delete all forks of the repository and hard reset all of our local environments.

Lastly, we worked with GitHub support to remove the cached commits! Thank you Eden.

As a side effect of this many of our PRs look a little funny:

Security discussions

We had a lot of back and forward conversations about security during this process. We’ve implemented a couple of safeguards during this process but the general consensus walking away from conversations with security firms/experts was that we were risking very little by open sourcing, and long-term, our codebase would be more secure.

Documentation

Lastly, we wanted to make sure that our codebase would be accessible to new developers. We worked on making the setup process smoother w/ Codespaces, wrote guides to the key parts of HCB (for example, this guide on the transaction mapping engine), and I gave a talk at SF Ruby with a brief overview of our codebase:

There’s still more work to do! Reach out if you wish a part of HCB was documented better (hcb-engr@hackclub.com). And, if you’re a teenager interested in helping out, join us in the #hcb-dev channel on the Hack Club Slack.

Years in the making - this is a proud moment for the whole team! I’ll leave you with this gource video of the codebase over the years.

Sending money just got way easier 💸 — whether it’s a check, ACH, or wire transfer, the Transfer Wizard guides you step-by-step to pick the perfect method. Just answer a couple of simple questions, and we’ll recommend the fastest, smoothest option for your needs. No guesswork, no confusion — just fast, easy transfers 🚀

We’re excited to introduce Donation Goals — a simple way to set clear targets for your fundraising efforts. You can now set a goal, track progress, and let your supporters see how close you are!

Looking for a new way to sign in? We've enabled time-based one time passwords for everyone; that means you can use apps like Google Authenticator or 1Password to generate temporary passwords for your HCB account.

Here's what it looks like in 1Password - my password manager of choice! Visit your security settings to enable TOTP.

If you're anything like me, the number in the little red dot next to your receipts tab gets a little too high sometimes, which presents a problem: how do I make that number lower so our bookkeeper isn't sad at month-end close while still putting in a minimum of effort because I'm lazy?

Receipt Bin is a game-changer for this – if you're not familiar with it yet please go read about it, I'll wait... (the pitch: throw all your receipts in here and then worry about attaching them to transactions later!)

My one gripe with it is that bringing in a whole inbox-ful of automatically generated receipts was always a task-and-a-half due to having to forward them one.. by one... by one..... as in the following dramatic reenactment:

No more! This annoyed me enough that I fixed it:

Now, any .eml attachments sent to your Receipt Bin inbox will be converted to PDF receipts the same way individual emails are.

In Gmail you can do this by selecting multiple emails, right-clicking, and clicking "Forward as attachment".

Most of the time they're even automatically matched to transactions! This means I can spend less of my time shuffling receipts around and more time spending moneydoing things that actually benefit Hack Clubbers.

I hope this speeds up your day too! Thanks for reading and happy HCBing :-D

We're working on making detailed transaction information available to you all; incoming ACH transfers now include details about who sent the ACH:

And, if an international wire is returned, we're now surfacing the return reason.

Hope this helps you all navigate the complex financial world!

Ever had a sponsor pay an invoice by check? It's awkward because then you're stuck with an "unpaid" invoice on HCB.

You can now mark invoices as paid if a sponsor pays using alternative means (check, cash, etc.):

We're experimenting with something new - drop in an invoice to the ACH or check form and HCB will do it’s best to autofill any fields.

Try it out and let us know what you think.

HCB's donation page is a great way to raise money for your organization. With one click, you can share a link to your donation page on social media, in emails, or on your website. It's incredibly versatile, but how do you know which platforms perform best?

Starting today, you can analyze which website referred your donors, and, for more granular insights, the UTM parameters of the link they clicked. This data is available on the transaction details page for all donations with referrer data.

Hopefully this feature will help you understand where your donors are coming from and how to better reach them in the future!

Right now, HCB's login page is a little boring. It gets the job done, but it's by no means exciting. That's why we're thrilled to unveil our refreshed login experience!

It features a sleek, intuitive design and now includes a gallery of handpicked images from iconic organizations running on HCB. Plus, it provides some insight into what HCB is all about.

We're hoping the new design improves your experience on HCB and we're always happy to hear feedback.

Happy new year! 🎉 I hope you had a restful break and enjoyed the holidays!

I want to take a moment and look back at the incredible year HCB had. In 2024 we shipped 40+ new features and countless bug fixes & backend improvements.

HCB 2024 by the numbers:

• 1,531 new organizations

• 5,129 new users

• $13,817,984.48 raised by organizations

• $8,507,567.32 spent by organizations

All of this was made possible by your incredible work. Congratulations on everything you've accomplished in 2024 and we are looking forward to working with all of you in the new year!

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🎁 HCB Wrapped 2024: Your year in review

It's that time of year again! We know you've been hard at work on your nonprofit projects, and we want to celebrate the achievements you've made in 2024. That's why we're excited to announce HCB Wrapped 2024, your year in review!

Check it out here: hcb.hackclub.com/wrapped

We hope you enjoy it. Happy holidays! 🎉

⛵What's been shipping?

✉️ Simplify your emails with Google Workspace aliases

Note:* You need to have access to the Google Workspace perk on HCB to use this feature*

Have you ever needed to have multiple emails for your organization (like help@, sponsor@, [your name]@)?

Previously, you would have had to create a new account for each address, but you no longer need to.

On HCB, you can now create up to 30 aliases per Google Workspace account; all emails to an alias will be sent to its parent account's inbox. No more having to flip through 10 different inboxes!

Customise your HCB cards!

Which card is which? Is 6014 for this or that? Ugh. If you're a member of multiple HCB organizations, it can be hard telling your cards apart.

I've started writing the organization name on the back of mine:

We've got a more elegant solution for you all, however. You can now customise the logo printed in the top right and we've started printing the organization name on the card:

(Apex is a high-altitude balloon-focused hackathon running on HCB!)

Plus, we've got white cards now. Fancy.

---

If you have feedback or feature requests, I'd love to hear them. Let me know your number one wish for HCB in 2025!

All the best,

Dylan & the HCB Team

It's that time of year again! We know you've been hard at work on your nonprofit projects, and we want to celebrate the achievements you've made in 2024. That's why we're excited to announce HCB Wrapped 2024, your year in review!

Check it out here: hcb.hackclub.com/wrapped

We hope you enjoy it. Happy holidays! 🎉

For those that celebrate, I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving🦃 and restful break.

In addition to some amazing ships, we are launching the HCB Blog! More details below.

I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday break and see you in the new year!

📝Introducing the HCB Blog!

Today we're launching a new way to stay up-to-date on HCB: our new blog.

For as long as I can remember, HCB has been using Headway to announce product updates and changes to users, but over time our needs have shifted. Along with changelog updates, we want to share more content online, like engineering deep-dives, our monthly newsletters, and more.

With this change, all of our posts are now open source and available on GitHub as well.

We're excited to share more with you in the future. Stay tuned!

⛵What's been shipping?

🍎 Fresh & crisp Apple Wallet card design

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For a long time, HCB cards appeared as a mysterious, dark, unbranded card in your Apple Wallet.

Today, we're excited to announce that it's getting a new look! Some people might say it's fresh & crisp, just like a juicy apple 🍎. Enjoy!

Thanks to Ian and Sam for the design work!

🌏 International bank transfers are here

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Exciting news for organizations doing work outside the US! HCB now supports sending money to overseas bank accounts via an international wire:

To send an international wire, you'll need your recipient's bank's SWIFT code and account number as well as some country-specific information. Once you've got that, it's just like sending an ACH transfer to a US bank account on HCB.

Unfortunately, wires are expensive to send. Our partner bank charges us $25 per wire; therefore, to keep HCB sustainable without passing this fee onto you, each wire sent must be at least $500. We've waived this requirement for organizations that have raised over $50k.

If you have any feedback on this wires feature, we'd love to hear from you! We're always looking to improve our product, and wires has been a difficult feature to polish.

💌 Let us know the best way to get in touch

---

When we need help from you, we want to make sure we're reaching out to the right people.

By default, we'll email everyone who is a part of your team on HCB. However, if you have a shared team email or would prefer for us to reach out to a specific email, you can now let us know.

🌟 HCB Spotlight

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Hack Club launched High Seas! This is the largest Hack Club event ever, having already reached more than 1.5 million teenagers around the world. High Seas empowers teenagers to build projects, share them, and collect Doubloons which can be redeemed for amazing prizes.

Like all Hack Club initiatives, High Seas is open source and has transparent finances with HCB!

NOTE: Exclusively for teenagers! Adults, hide your eyes!

Until January 31st, we will send you free stuff just for coding. Here's how it works:

1. BUILD! Ship personal coding projects to earn Doubloons
2. BATTLE! Ships compete for bonuses in peer-voted 1v1 matchups
3. BOOTY! Exchange your Doubloons for cool stuff in the shop
4. REPEAT! Build, battle, and booty it up until January 31st

To learn more and get involved, click here!

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If you have feedback or feature requests, I'd love to hear them. Let me know your number one complaint about HCB by replying to this email.

All the best,

Dylan & the HCB Team

Which card is which? Is 6014 for this or that? Ugh. If you’re a member of multiple HCB organizations, it can be hard telling your cards apart.

I’ve started writing the organization name on the back of mine:

We’ve got a more elegant solution for you all, however. You can now customise the logo printed in the top right and we’ve started printing the organization name on the card:

(Apex is a high-altitude balloon-focused hackathon running on HCB!)

Plus, we’ve got white cards now. Fancy.

Note: You need to have access to the Google Workspace perk on HCB to use this feature

Have you ever needed to have multiple emails for your organization (like help@, sponsor@, [your name]@)?

Previously, you would have had to create a new account for each address, but you no longer need to.

On HCB, you can now create up to 30 aliases per Google Workspace account; all emails to an alias will be sent to its parent account's inbox. No more having to flip through 10 different inboxes!

Today we're launching a new way to stay up-to-date on HCB: our new blog. And you're looking right at it!

For as long as I can remember, HCB has been using Headway to announce product updates and changes to users, but over time our needs have shifted. Along with changelog updates, we want to share more content online, like engineering deep-dives, our monthly newsletters, and more.

With this change, all of our posts are now open source and available on GitHub as well.

We're excited to share more with you in the future. Stay tuned!

For a long time, HCB cards appeared as a mysterious, dark, unbranded card in your Apple Wallet.

Today, we're excited to announce that it's getting a new look! Some people might say it's fresh & crisp, just like a juicy apple 🍎. Enjoy!

Thanks to Ian and Sam for the design work!

Exciting news for organizations doing work outside the US! HCB now supports sending money to overseas bank accounts via an international wire:

To send an international wire, you'll need your recipient's bank's SWIFT code and account number as well as some country-specific information. Once you've got that, it's just like sending an ACH transfer to a US bank account on HCB.

Unfortunately, wires are expensive to send. Our partner bank charges us $25 per wire; therefore, to keep HCB sustainable without passing this fee onto you, each wire sent must be at least $500. We've waived this requirement for organizations that have raised over $50k.

When we need help from you, we want to make sure we're reaching out to the right people.

By default, we'll email everyone who is a part of your team on HCB. However, if you have a shared team email or would prefer for us to reach out to a specific email, you can now let us know:

🎃 Spooky finances!

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It's that time of year! The HCB dashboard has been taken over by witches and ghosts. Don't worry though, if you ever get scared you can always disable this theme in your Settings.

☎️ HCB Help Center

HCB officially has a Help Center! Over the past few weeks, we have been adding articles to it covering all aspects of HCB. Check it out if you ever have a question! You can access it here or by click on the blue Support Button on HCB.

⛵What's been shipping?

🔒 Keep your HCB account secure with two-factor authentication

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Looking for a little bit of extra security? You can now turn on two-factor authentication for your account:

That'll prompt you for two authentication factors each time you log in, whether it's a hardware security key, a login code sent to your email/phone, or a time-based one time password.

You know what they say about 2FA, you may find it mildly annoying but baddies find it infuriating. Ok, no one says that but you get the point.

🔁 Seamlessly switch between your organizations

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Are you a part of multiple organizations on HCB? Simply click on your organization's title to navigate between them! 🔥

✔︎ Verifying your account & routing number?

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Are you trying to manually link your organization's account & routing numbers with a 3rd party service? Sometimes these services will ask for a bank account letter that proves you have access to your account number.

Luckily for you, sitting right on your documents page is a verification letter you can share. ✨✅

This handy one-pager allows organizations on HCB to prove they have access to their account & routing numbers.

🌟 HCB Spotlight

LCOY 2024, a UN sponsored event, was recently held in Arizona. LCOY (Local Conference of Youth) is a youth-led, youth-organized, weekend long conference which brings together over 125 youth delegates from across the country--- carefully selected for their leadership in the climate movement--- to learn, network, collaborate, and work together to ensure that young people's demands about climate change are represented at the national and international level.

The whole event ran on HCB and you can view their finances here.

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If you have feedback or feature requests, I'd love to hear them. Let me know your number one complaint about HCB by replying to this email.

All the best,

Dylan & the HCB Team

Are you trying to manually link your organization's account & routing numbers with a 3rd party service? Sometimes these services will ask for a bank account letter that proves you have access to your account number.

Luckily for you, sitting right on your documents page is a verification letter you can share. ✨✅

This handy one-pager allows organizations on HCB to prove they have access to their account & routing numbers.

Looking for a little bit of extra security? You can now turn on two-factor authentication for your account:

That'll prompt you for two authentication factors each time you log in, whether it's a hardware security key, a login code sent to your email/phone, or a time-based one time password.

~~You know what they say about 2FA, you may find it mildly annoying but baddies find it infuriating.~~ Ok, no one says that but you get the point.

Are you a part of multiple organizations on HCB? Simply click on your organization's title to navigate between them! 🔥

I realized last time I didn't introduce myself! My name is Dylan, I'm the Product Manager here at HCB. This means in addition to directly supporting organizations on HCB, I get to work with our incredible engineering team to design new features.

Before joining HCB late last year, I was heavily involved in climate justice organizing at New York University. I helped start the Sunrise Movement chapter on campus and pushed the university administration to stop investing in the fossil fuel industry.

If you ever have feature requests or ideas on how to make HCB better, let me know!

⛵What's been shipping?

💫 Sleek new footer & support button

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We've put all the essential support links into a single support button at the bottom right of your screen. With just a click, you can contact us, leave feedback, or access our API docs and brand guidelines.

Also, be sure to visit our Help Center for tips, guides, and answers to FAQs---it's the best way to make the most of our features.

✨ AI-powered transaction memos

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Transparency Mode has been one of HCB's flagship features for years. It revolutionized nonprofit financial transparency and allowed donors and the public to see how an organization utilizes funds. However, we've found that showcasing every transaction can sometimes mean extra housekeeping work for teams to keep the ledger tidy.

That's why we're excited to announce AI-powered memos for transactions!

Now, with 1-click, you can generate a transaction memo summarizing the receipt for any transaction. It's pretty simple:

1. Upload a receipt to a transaction.

2. Click the purple AI button to generate a memo.

3. Accept the suggestions by clicking the checkmark or pressing [enter].

You'll also notice that the receipt sidebar now includes some extracted information that provides a glanceable overview of the receipt's contents.

As usual, we want to hear what you think!

💝 Simple, secure one-click donations

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As your fiscal sponsor, our mission is to empower your mission. This means helping you collect the donations that keep the lifeblood of your organization running.

As a result, we're introducing donations powered by Link. Link autofills your donors' payment details so they can easily complete their donation.

These simple, secure one-click payments are helping organizations grow their funds.

In addition to Link, we support Apple Pay, Google Pay, and good old-fashioned cards! 💳

⚡ We've sped up ACH transfers from three days to one day

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All ACH transfers sent from HCB are now processed same-day!

That means, the moment an ACH is approved by HCB, it'll arrive that day (view the timing specifics). In most cases, this should cut the waiting time for an ACH from three business days to one.

🎉 Comment reactions are here!

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You can now react to comments 😱! Show your thoughts instantly with a tap---whether it's a thumbs up, heart, or something else. Give it a try and add some fun to your conversations!

🌟 HCB Spotlight

Exciting times are ahead for girls and nonbinary high school students at Hack Club.

Hack Club HQ is running four events in the next few months to empower girls and nonbinary students who code! All these events are running on HCB, using Transparency Mode. Each hackathon kicks off with a dinner featuring trailblazing women in tech.
To learn more about these events and how to get involved, click here.

Golden hackathon, Bay Area, Sept 28th: workshops on Data Science, 3D Printing, and Web Development, with participants from Mission YoungArts, Home Away from Homelessness, and local schools.

Luna hackathon, New York City's Civic Hall, October 5th, with Girls Who Code on Web Development, Project Pitching, and Video Game Development with Sprig.

Celestial hackathon, Toronto, on October 19th at Shopify, will feature sessions on building PCBs, 3D modeling, and AI.

Ascend summit, Los Angeles, in mid-November, bringing together 50 girls and non-binary Hack Club leaders from around the world to code and meet mentors.

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If you have feedback or feature requests, I'd love to hear them. Let me know your number one complaint about HCB by replying to this email.

All the best,

Dylan & the HCB Team

All ACH transfers sent from HCB are now processed same-day!

That means, the moment an ACH is approved by HCB, it’ll arrive that day (view the timing specifics). In most cases, this should cut the waiting time for an ACH from three business days to one.

As your fiscal sponsor, our mission is to empower your mission. This means helping you collect the donations that keep the lifeblood of your organization running.

As a result, we're introducing donations powered by Link. Link autofills your donors' payment details so they can easily complete their donation.

These simple, secure one-click payments are helping organizations grow their funds.

In addition to Link, we support Apple Pay, Google Pay, and good old-fashioned cards! 💳

You can now react to comments 😱! Show your thoughts instantly with a tap—whether it's a thumbs up, heart, or something else. Give it a try and add some fun to your conversations!

Welcome to the newly revamped HCB monthly newsletter... we got word your inbox was feeling lonely, so we're here to spice things up!

🎉 Orgs on HCB have raised more than $15 million!

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This is because of you! We provide the foundation, you put in the work to raise money, host amazing events, and better your community.

And y'all are not slowing down at all. Just this year, orgs on HCB have raised almost 10 million dollars! 👀

⛵ What's been shipping?

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🔎 Zoom around HCB with the Command Bar.

Need to get some where quickly in HCB? Try hitting Ctrl / ⌘ + k to pull up the command bar.

From there you can navigate to all of your organizations or search HCB for a specific transaction, card, or reimbursement. Let us know what you think!

🙏 Allow donors to cover fiscal sponsorship fees.

If you've got donors feeling super generous, they can now check a box to cover the fees associated with their donations.

That means more money for you! If you'd like this on your organization's donation form, enable it in your Donation settings.

🚨 Notifications for new device sign ins.

Another day, another slay security improvement.

We'll now send you an email when you sign in to HCB from a new device.

Shrimple as that 🦐

🔥 Lost a card? Burn it.

There's nothing worse than checking for your card and realizing it's fallen out of your pocket. Now, when that happens, you can now permanently cancel and prevent any future transactions.

🌟 HCB Spotlight

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The Trail

This summer, 30 Hack Clubbers from 12 states and 9 countries designed their own circuit boards. Then they went on a 7 day hike through the California wilderness. Many had never backpacked before, most had not made a circuit board, and almost everyone was meeting for the first time in-person.

View The Trail's transparent finances.

Campus Climate Network

Campus Climate Network, a youth-led organization empowering student activists, hosted their Climate Finance Fellowship retreat in Pennsylvania. They are leaders in the climate justice space, collectively representing hundreds of students.

View Campus Climate Network's transparent finances.

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We hope you enjoy these new changes. As always, if you have feedback or feature requests, please reach out to hcb@hackclub.com or reply here.

All the best,

We've put all the essential support links into a single support button at the bottom right of your screen. With just a click, you can contact us, leave feedback, or access our API docs and brand guidelines.

Also, be sure to visit our Help Center for tips, guides, and answers to FAQs—it's the best way to make the most of our features.

Transparency Mode has been one of HCB’s flagship features for years. It revolutionized nonprofit financial transparency and allowed donors and the public to see how an organization utilizes funds. However, we’ve found that showcasing every transaction can sometimes mean extra housekeeping work for teams to keep the ledger tidy.

That’s why we’re excited to announce AI-powered memos for transactions!

Now, with 1-click, you can generate a transaction memo summarizing the receipt for any transaction. It’s pretty simple:

1. Upload a receipt to a transaction.
2. Click the purple AI button to generate a memo.
3. Accept the suggestions by clicking the checkmark or pressing [enter].

You’ll also notice that the receipt sidebar now includes some extracted information that provides a glanceable overview of the receipt’s contents.

As usual, we want to hear what you think!

There's nothing worse than checking for your card and realizing it's fallen out of your pocket. Now, when that happens, you can burn the card to cancel it and prevent any future transactions.

In the dark days of HCB, inviting people to your organization was always a binary risk assessment - "do I give this person unfettered access to everything, or nothing at all?"

Once we realized this was Suboptimal And A Bit Dangerous™️, we started to think about operational security from users' perspectives more carefully.

User roles was step one. This introduced predetermined permission sets to control users' access in an organization.

Today, we're introducing spending controls. This allows managers of HCB organizations to impose a finer level of control on how much money a member can spend.

Here is a rundown of how to use it:

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To get to a team member's spending controls page, visit the Team page and click on the $ icon next to their name.

A team member's spending controls page gives you consolidated details of how they're using their cards.

When controls are disabled, a member can spend any amount of money with their cards. (Since they're not managers, so still can't transfer via ACH, check, HCB transfer, etc.)

Now, let's enable spending controls for Fiona.

With spending controls enabled, new transactions on Fiona's card will be approved/declined based on Fiona's balance. Since we haven't given her an allowance yet, her balance is zero! (as seen above)

Let's give Fiona an allowance of $2,500!

Hint: click the New button on the top right.

Now that I've given Fiona an allowance, she can spend it with her card! This $2,500 didn't leave the organization's balance when I created an allowance. Instead, both balances will decrease when she makes a purchase.

You should probably also know that these allowances are not time-dependent. They don't expire, and they do not recur (it's not a weekly/monthly limit).

As a convenience, you can also choose to enable spending controls and set an initial amount when you invite someone to your organization.

Need to get somewhere quickly in HCB? Try hitting Ctrl / ⌘ + k to pull up the command bar:

From there you can navigate to all of your organizations or search HCB for a specific transaction, card, or reimbursement. Let us know what you think!

Another day, another ~~slay~~ security improvement.

We'll now send you an email when you sign in to HCB from a new device.

Shrimple as that 🦐

If you've got donors feeling super generous, they can now check a box to cover the fees associated with their donations:

That means more money for you! If you'd like this on your organization's donation form, enable it in the Feature previews settings section.

Got receipts? Now you can text them to us. Every time your card is charged IRL, HCB will send you a text, if you respond to that text with a photo of your receipt we'll upload it to the transaction.

Have you ever received a check in the mail and forgot to deposit it? ~~I sure have.~~

Now, we’ll remind you if you haven’t deposited an HCB check after a month, and again when you're nearing the end of the validity period (as long as the sender opted to notify the recipient).

Talking of, go and deposit that check sitting on your desk!

At HCB, we love security! You already could view active login sessions on your User Security Settings page. We're now expanding it to include recently logged-out sessions just in case you're curious about when you last logged in/out of HCB!

This is just one of the many improvements to account security we’re making to HCB. More to come!

Looking to thank your donors? We now provide an export of your organization’s donors. Simply download the CSV from the Donations page and upload it to your favorite newsletter campaign service!

oh look! total_amount_cents tells you the total amount each donor has donated to your organization.

You’ve been long asking for it! Exporting transactions from your organization’s ledger now includes comments. Whether you use comments to categorize transactions or add additional context, they are now visible when you export them from HCB.

We support three formats: CSV, JSON, and Ledger!

We will be performing a scheduled database maintenance on June 13th, 2024 at 8 pm PT. It is expected for this maintenance to last an hour.

You will not be able to access your account and card transactions will decline during this time.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at hcb@hackclub.com

Hey folks! You may have noticed that we recently revamped our PayPal form; PayPal is now fully integrated into HCB. Thanks to this we can now send reimbursements through PayPal, including to contributors outside of the United States.

If you need to send a reimbursement to a person outside of the USA, have them select "PayPal" as their preferred payout method.

We will be performing a scheduled database maintenance on May 20th, 2024 at 8 pm PT. It is expected for this maintenance to last an hour.

You will not be able to access your account and card transactions will decline during this time.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at hcb@hackclub.com

Hey folks - thanks for all great feedback on our recent reimbursements launch!

We’ve now made the peer review stage of the reimbursements flow optional. That means that you can choose whether or not other team members have to review a report submitted by a team member.

This setting can be found under Reimbursements on your organization’s settings page.

Team reviews are still required for all reports submitted by external contributors.

👋 Hey everyone! Ever wanted to give out CUSTOM stickers for your organization/event? We're proud to announce that HCB has partnered with StickerNinja to offer all our fiscally sponsored organizations an exclusive 15% discount on sticker purchases made on their store!

This new perk can be found in the "Perks" tab of your HCB organization's dashboard. Send some custom stickers out into the 🌎!

Money’s great. If you’re reading this, you probably like money. Now, we’re making it easier than ever to get it.

Starting today, you can now process reimbursements for yourself, your team members, and your volunteers through HCB directly.

Looking to be reimbursed? Here's the process:

1. Compile a collection of expenses into a report on HCB.

2. Have your report reviewed by a team member and a HCB admin.

3. Get paid through ACH transfer or check.

You can try it out today in “Reimbursements” tab of your project.

Been using Expensify? We'll continue to process open reports; however, future reports should be made on HCB. We'll reach out soon with more details about offboarding from Expensify.

As your organization grows, so too does the number of people you invite to HCB. Today, we're handing you the keys to lock down critical actions to your most trusted team members.

When managing your team on HCB, you now have the choice of assigning users one of two roles: manager or member.

• Managers can do everything, just like everyone could before. This includes actions like editing your organization's settings, managing other users, and sending money (ACH, Check, HCB transfer, etc.).

• Members have limited permissions, but they can still spend money using their HCB card.

Our goal is to enhance security and provide you with the tools to grow your organization. Take it for a test drive by enabling the User Roles feature preview in your organization's settings. To learn more, see the roles page.

This feature has been highly requested, and we want to get it right. If you have feedback, please file it in the box at the bottom right of HCB.

We will be performing a scheduled database maintenance on April 3rd, 2024 at 10 pm PT. It is expected for this maintenance to last an hour.

You will not be able to access your account and card transactions will decline during this time.

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at hcb@hackclub.com

You can now void your invoices if you make a mistake in filling out a field, or if the invoice is no longer needed (like if it's overdue)!

Just click the big red "Void this Invoice" button on an invoice and it'll be voided permanently.

People often leave comments on transactions but if you're in a lot of organizations it's easy to miss them. HCB will now email you every time a comment is left on one of your organization's transactions.

You'll never miss an important comment again:

(yay for ice cream!)

Need to see your organization's transactions in a convenient, downloadable, and accessible format? Have I got something for you! HCB now has Monthly Account Statements, similar to statements provided by traditional banks.

You can access your organization's account statements by opening the Documentation tab on your HCB dashboard and clicking Statements.

One of HCB’s most commonly used features is making payments with physical cards. To further enhance your security, we’ve improved the card issuing process to ensure the card arrives at its intended destination prior to use. As usual, when receiving a physical card in the mail, follow the link provided in the instructions. You may notice that we require your card’s last 4 digits during the activation process.

If you’re trying to find one transaction in particular from a certain date, gone are the days of trying to guess the page number. Simply filter by date:

Keep your eye out for more features in the coming weeks! Over the past few months, a group of us Hack Clubbers have been learning the rails of the HCB codebase as part of the Mentorship program.

Since May 2022, you've been able to respond to HCB's transaction notifications with a receipt.

Starting today, you can rename the transaction in the same email. Simply type @rename and follow that with your memo for the transaction, for example:

@rename 🍔 Lunch with HCB users in Berkeley

HCB will handle the rest! Pretty sweet, huh?

Mistakes happen and we get it. Now, if you need to repay your organization for accidental charges on your HCB card you can click the Flag as a personal transaction button on the transaction details page:

Behind the scenes, we've got a team of auditors and accountants making sure HCB keeps running. It's tax season and they're busy at work.

To make auditing more streamlined, we're going to be collecting receipts for all ACH transfers and outbound checks.

Receipts will be required for ACHs & checks sent after February 2024.

Want to get a head start? The field for receipts is already there:

Have fun! And thanks for helping us keep HCB compliant with IRS requirements.

[Preview]

We at Hack Club HQ love to fill our HCB account's ledger with emojis and custom memos for each transaction. Recently, however, we've been falling behind due to the volume of transactions on the account.

Today, we've added a new feature preview ("Rename Transactions on the Ledger") that'll make renaming transactions a lot faster. After enabling it, head to your organization's homepage and double click on any transaction's memo. A text box will appear and you'll be able to add a custom memo right there on the homepage. All you've got to do is click enter to save!

A couple of exciting updates to donations have shipped in the past month. Here's a quick rundown:

• Donors can now leave a message when they make a donation (this message will be emailed to you!)

• In your organization's settings page, you can set a reply-to email for the receipts that donors receive.

• You can send a message to your donor by replying to the donation notification email that HCB sends you!

Trying to find that card charge for last year's Christmas cookies? Struggling to locate the check you used to pay your event venue? Worry no more, we've got you.

Now, you can filter the ledger by transaction type (eg. check or donation) or by the user who made the transaction:

Try it out on Hack Club HQ's page: hcb.hackclub.com/hq.

The holidays are coming up and we know many of you are trying to keep yourselves off the accountants’ naughty list. And that means uploading receipts! To aid you in your recordkeeping endeavors, we’re launching a brand new feature: Receipt Bin.

Receipt Bin allows you to upload your receipts now and worry about them later. Rather than scrambling to upload the receipt to the right transaction, you can just text it or email it to us. We’ll hang onto them for you and will try to suggest which transaction they belong to. You can then swing by the new-and-improved Receipt Center at any time to link the receipts from your Receipt Bin to their corresponding transaction.

Text (864) 548-HACK or head to the settings page‬ to get started today!

Starting today, in addition to a CSV or JSON file, you can now export your transaction into a Ledger file for use with the Ledger CLI.

You may be wondering, what's the backstory behind Ledger? Five years ago, Hack Club HQ used Ledger to keep track of and open source all it's finances: https://github.com/hackclub/ledger. It became too much to maintain. When HQ itself began using HCB, we built Transparency Mode so that we could continue open sourcing our finances. That said, Ledger still is awesome. So now, if you'd like to use the Ledger CLI and are on HCB, you can export your transactions to the .ledger file format and have fun exploring your money in the terminal!

Additionally, you can also export the transactions of organisations with Transparency Mode enabled, check out HQ's finances: https://hcb.hackclub.com/exports/hq.ledger.

Hey folks! We've got two brand new bits of info to share with you all. First, Hack Club Bank is growing — we just hit 💸 $10,000,000 💸 in total transactions for fiscally sponsored organizations! Go you! (and this doesn't even include Hack Club's money!)

Second bit of news: the government has some rules about who can— and cannot— call themselves a bank. Now that we've grown a LOT, it's time to change the way we refer to ourselves. As of today, we're shortening our name to HCB.

To celebrate, here are 10 acronyms for HCB:

Hankering for Cold Beans
Highly Confused Butler
Howling Canine Brigade
Hungry for Coarse Brisket
Hateful Crowd Booing
Happy Camels on Bicycles
Hungry Cheese Bandit
Hearin' those Catchy Blues
Hopelessly Craving Bacon
Hilarious Circus Buffoonery

We can now be found at hcb.hackclub.com, hackclub.com/hcb, hcb@hackclub.com, and so on. Not to fret, though; all of your old links will redirect, and we can still be reached at our old email.

We're still the same ol' fiscal sponsor you know and love, just with a few fewer letters. New name, same great taste!

Tired of having transactions declined because you accidentally put in your address instead of ours? Now you can edit your billing address (and update payment information accordingly) wherever you Bank!

Say goodbye to baring the heavy prestige of Fiona Hackworth III, and just be known as Fiona!

While we are required to collect legal names for compliance, most places on Hack Club Bank will now just show your preferred name (if set).

Go to your settings and set your preferred name today!

Hi HCB users! Has it been your lifelong dream to use Google Workspace? ☁️ Have you ever wanted to make your emails even more awesome with the flair of a custom domain? Well, now you can - we're relaunching the Google Workspace perk! 🎉

Head on over to your org on Bank, and you'll find that there's now a Google Workspace tab in the sidebar where you can join the waitlist!

Once you've filled out the form, we'll get back to you within the next 48 hours to let you know if you're approved for one of our open slots.

Unfortunately, we still only have a set limit of slots for access from Google to distribute, but we have systems in place now that will open these up more frequently.

💰 P.S. Orgs with donor funding will be prioritized for open slots.

Now, when you share links from Hack Club Bank on social media or messaging apps, you'll see a preview image accompanying the link, providing the world with an eye-catching window into your organization’s finances.

At Hack Club Bank, pushing for financial transparency is one of our primary goals. Social media preview images are a small touch that make your finances more shareable and clickable across the web.

Try it out today by enabling Transparency Mode, and enjoy the refreshed visual appeal of sharing your finances!

HCB prides itself on being at the cutting edge of banking technology. But some parts of the financial system are a little... less cutting-edge.

We want to support those systems too, so now, you can deposit checks directly into your Hack Club Bank account by just taking a photo! Just snap a picture, wait a day or two, and watch the funds roll into your account.

This feature is available now for everyone. Go write yourself a check and deposit it right now, I dare you!

Have a receipt or two missing? Ignore it every week and now that 1-2 receipts has grown into a much larger number?

For those extra receipts, you can now opt-into a receipt report email on your feature previews page.

This just in: Hack Club Bank accounts now have account/routing numbers, which means you can receive payouts from platforms like Shopify and Venmo!

Here are some cool things you can do with account numbers:

• Get sponsorships through GitHub Sponsors
• Start a swag shop with Shopify
• Get paid by sponsors without going through the Bank team
• Make a sandwich (untested)

You can receive money from any platform that asks for an account/routing number. For security, your account number is deposit-only: you can't withdraw money using it.

This is live for everyone right now— check out the new "Account/routing number" page in your sidebar and start receiving money!

Fundraising for your nonprofit or hackathon is hard, and takes time away from actually using the donated money. What if the funds could raise themselves?

To fix this, I added a monthly subscription option to your organization's donation page— now when a donor sends a payment, they can opt-in to make their donation monthly. No more manually sending invoices every month.

Here's my own org's monthly donation page!

This feature is live for everyone right now— you don't need to opt-in. You can see your recurring donors in your dashboard's Donations tab:

Hope this helps you spend less time fundraising, and more time doing whatever it is your nonprofit does.

As of today you can test out a new preview feature: SMS notifications when you swipe your card.

Emails aren't always immediate, and when you're dashing through the checkout line at Costco while stocking up on breakfast for your hackathon 2 minutes could be the difference between remembering to take a photo of your receipt or throwing it away entirely.

Now with SMS notifications, you'll get this:

When you use your card in-person, you'll get a text with a link to upload your receipt. You can opt-in to the feature preview from your feature previews page.

In the future we can add the ability to reply directly to the text with a photo of your receipt.

You can name your card to help keep everything organized (eg. General Spending, Online Retailers, Amazon). Rename your cards by clicking on the edit name button when viewing your card.

Your homepage is now a bit more customizable— if you're a member of several organizations on Bank, you can now change their order just by dragging them around!

Hey all! Today hackathon grants are live.

In case you missed it, we’re distributing $500 grants for IRL high school hackathons with the help of FIRST.

If you're planning to run your own, check it out.

Additionally, we’re waiving the 7% fee for IRL high school hackathons until Dec 31st. That means any funds you raise between now and then are fee-free! You can check your fee status on your event’s settings page.

P.S. The first grant has already gone out!

Renaming transactions is a great way to organize your finances on Hack Club Bank. It also helps team members and supporters to understand how your organization's money is spent. Upon renaming a transaction, you'll now be provided with a dropdown list of suggestions based on similar, previous transactions in your transaction history!

Donations and invoices now deposit in the time it takes for you to read this sentence.

With many financial systems, money can take up to two weeks to move. But now on Hack Club Bank, gone are the days when you had to wait. Behind the scenes, we will seamlessly loan you the incoming funds.

The money will be ✨ instantly ✨ available for your pizza buying needs!

— Gary, Ella, and Caleb

Want to add some pizzazz to your organization's donation page? You can now upload a logo and header image to make your donation page feel a little more like yours.

See it in action at hack.af/donate, or try it out yourself by clicking "Donations" in your sidebar!

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pssst! developers! you can now see organization logos in the API's logo field!

Hey fellow Bankers!

Every event needs a great venue and with a great venue comes insurance requirements... but where do you start?! A Google search lands you so many options and probably more questions than when you started...

Partnering with The Event Helper, we’ve created a streamlined process for you to purchase event insurance on Bank without the hassle. You now have access to a simplified, custom form in your “Perks” tab, and once submitted, Bank team will provide you with a custom quote. All of the costs are directly from The Event Helper – we don't charge a fee on top!

We're excited to share that Hack Club Bank now has an official public API.

The Hack Club Bank API is a read-only, unauthenticated REST API which enables you to read public information from organizations with Transparency Mode enabled. This includes transaction history like checks, ACHs, invoices, transfers, donations, as well as organizations and their respective team members.

This API will pave the way for more applications like Slack Club Bank, HackPenn's financial visualization, and your next amazing project. We can't wait to see what you ship!

If you run into any bugs or have any feedback, please let us know at bank@hackclub.com!

— Ella, Caleb, and Gary

Have you ever wanted to change your organization's URL? Previously this was a dangerous affair; bookmarks to the old URL would just stop working, including your donation page.

Now, we'll automatically redirect your old URL to your new one! It's like magic.

You can change your organization's URL by clicking "Settings" in the sidebar. Happy hacking!

Starting today, Hack Club Bank will be sending out seasonal newsletters to share about new features, transparent orgs, and other awesome announcements. 🎉 Feel free to reach out to me if you didn't receive the summer edition and would like to be added!

The financial system in the US is a little slow. In personal finance, that's annoying. For a hackathon organizer who needs to buy 50+ burritos while herding ~~cats~~ attendees & dodging taxis in NYC, slow money transfers is too much.

As of today we've improved our account transfers beta to instantly add to your balance.

Donations usually take 3-5 days from a donor swiping their card to finally arriving in your account. Hackathon organizers often zero out their balance while waiting for a donation payment to arrive.

You can now request a front for paid funds that are still in transit– if your event is happening within 7 days we'll lend you the funds via an instant transfer from us, to you. Once the event is over we'll transfer the funds back out of your account.

Eligible invoices and donations have a button to request a front:

Keep in mind we can only front funds that we can confirm paid (ie. they swiped their card successfully, but the funds haven't arrived yet), and we may take up to 24 hours to get your request. Although we're focusing on hackathons running within 7 days, we know everyone has a different story. If you have a special circumstance, please reach out– we are happy to talk through it with you.

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p.s. Users who enabled the account transfer beta will also find their transfers reflect in their budgets immediately, instead of the 3-4 days that it used to take.

Little update to the donation form: donors can now contribute to your project using Apple Pay! This feature is now available to all organizations running on Hack Club Bank.

Today we're shipping 3 major improvements to the receipt uploading experience on Hack Club Bank!

1. Your receipts page is now smarter– just click "Add a receipt" or drag & drop a file to instantly attach your receipt. We've also fixed a bug that caused declined & refunded transactions to show up, even though they don't need receipts.
   
   
   
   The transaction details page has drag & drop, too– just drop a file anywhere to upload a receipt to that transaction.

2. In a busy checkout line? The “upload a receipt” link we email you has been totally redesigned for mobile, with the ability to take photos of your receipt directly from the page. If you’re uploading from a tablet or laptop, drag-and-drop is also supported.

3. Finally, you don’t even have to open Bank– now you can reply to the “upload a receipt” emails with a photo or PDF of your receipt. This is especially useful if you have limited bandwidth and can't load the site.

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What's next– receipt upload via direct brain connection? We'd love to hear your ideas, both for receipts and other features– be sure to leave us your feedback in Slack or via the Bank interface!

– Caleb and Max

A feature preview is live for users to try out: transfers between HCB accounts.

People who are on multiple teams (ie. running a hackathon and running a club with separate accounts) can manage their money across accounts on Hack Club Bank.

Previously users would have to invoice themselves to move funds. Besides the 7% fee on those funds, it would take between 5-7 days for funds to show up. Transfers cut the time in half and changes "fee" to "free".

You can enable the beta in your account settings. Please send me your feedback!

A new feature preview is available for users to opt-into. Once enabled, you can reply to the automated "upload your receipt" emails with your receipt directly– no need to click any links.

You can enable the preview in your account settings. Please send me your feedback!

1Password is providing $100 USD of credit to all organizations on Hack Club Bank. If you're not familiar, 1Password is a password manager that allows you to securely keep and share account logins and credentials with your teammates without the hassle; Hack Club HQ uses 1Password too!

To claim the promotion, head to the promotions page on your dashboard and click the “Apply” button. Don’t hesitate to reach out via email to bank@hackclub.com or in the #bank channel on Slack if you have any questions or feedback.

We've just rolled out a set of changes around card charges to give a better understanding of where a transaction came from.

1. Now you can access more details about where you're making purchases from. You can click on the name of the seller/merchant for a transaction to get a list of details, such as their location, type of store, and contact info (when provided).
2. You can be sure your transactions are secure by viewing the payment type, location, and verification checks that ran when you spent your money. If a transaction is declined, you can tell if you mistyped your address or missed the expiration date.

Each of these charges are on Hack Club HQ.

Hey everyone! (🎺🎺 noises) I’m announcing my first ever feature contribution to Hack Club Bank. 🎉 On your homepage, after logging in, you can now use the section called "Feedback" to ... well I think you can guess ... submit any ideas you have for cool new features on Bank! As always, you can still continue to reach out to us on the Hack Club Slack or by email.

Few things are as essential to the banking experience as photo IDs. You always gotta wait for the teller to get a real good look at you, and your ID, before making a transaction. (after all, you wouldn't want your near-identical evil twin stealing your hard-earned money)

The Hack Club Bank experience should feel as good or better than a physical IRL bank. Now, you can sign in using just your face (or fingerprint), on supported devices & browsers.

Currently, this includes modern versions of Google Chrome, Safari, and Edge (as well as some versions of Firefox), but you can check for support on your current device using this nifty website.

Have a Yubikey? Guess what: Bank supports hardware security keys too!

To get set up, head on down to the brand new Security Keys section of your Bank settings. You'll be enjoying faster sign-ins in no time!

I hate passwords. I can never remember them when I need them, each new account I create means another 'unique' password, and people are great at leaking them. We really don't want to burden everyone with all that just to access their financial platform, so now it's even easier to login to Hack Club Bank without a password.

I'm happy to announce that you can now get login codes for Hack Club Bank via SMS. The feature can be enabled from your settings page.

Users on iPhone and some Android phones can autofill their SMS login code.

You can now get your passwordless login code that much faster– reducing login on some devices down to under 10 seconds.

This post is to explain the background details of our switch to Stripe Issuing. Accounts that need action to make the switch will receive an email.

Emburse cards have been a feature since one of the earliest versions of Hack Club Bank, allowing any team member to spend money with a debit card without dealing with reimbursements. While that’s been amazing, there have been a few trade-offs with using Emburse:

1. Separate bank & card balances. This was the big one. Emburse cards spent money from an Emburse balance ("card balance" in the Bank interface). That meant after you raised money, you couldn’t immediately spend it. The invoice/donation needed to deposit, you needed to transfer the money to your card, wait 3-5 business days, then you could spend your money. Ideally, moving money should take only the 3-5 seconds of fishing your card out of your pockets & tapping at the register.
2. A separate website login to remember. We tried to hide emburse.com from as much of the app as possible, but at the end of the day Emburse was built for people to use directly. To issue a card to someone, we had to create an Emburse account. To activate your card, you had to sign into emburse.com.

These trade-offs made sense when we first started, but lots of details have changed in the last 2 years. Hack Club Bank has grown by…I started doing the math on this, but the comparison is stupid–our first year on Emburse has less than $1k spent per month, last week Bank users spent $20k through their cards. Emburse has been acquired (by a company that renamed to Emburse) & have shifted their product features.

Recently Emburse announced they’d be removing the card budgeting feature Bank currently relies on. If we stayed on Emburse the new flow would require organizers to request funds for a purchase, staff (Michael / Chaleb) to approve the purchase amount, then the card could make the transaction. Emburse was super gracious about the change, delaying the budget feature removal long enough for us to switch to another platform.

The card alternative we’ve eyed for awhile is Stripe Issuing, but it was in private beta we couldn’t access when we built Hack Club Bank. At the time of writing, we’ve got a private version of Stripe Issuing cards running on Hack Club Bank (only available to admins) to make sure our new system works. I’m happy to say it improves many of the previous issues with cards:

1. You’ll have 1 true balance: this should explain itself. Donations go into your account balance, your card spends from your account balance, no more transfers & maintaining two balances.
2. All built into Bank: no more Emburse account login, just login to Bank with your email.
3. More card control: ever forget the billing zip code of your Emburse card was 90069? or was it 60096? I don’t even remember it. Now we’ve got way more control over cards through the Stripe Issuing API. You can use your own card billing address instead of Hack Club’s, we can make keeping track of receipts way easier, we can let you spend money without waiting for a physical card to ship. The Stripe Issuing API is way more flexible, and we’re working on a bunch of ways to let you spend money more easily.

This is obviously a big change, and if you have any questions/comments please let us know either by reaching out to bank@hackclub.com or posting in the #bank channel on Slack.

4 major improvements to Bank live today:

1. Aesthetic overhaul. All the controls of the app—buttons, cards, menus, filters, inputs, modals, tables—have new colors & a new look & feel. Additionally, you’ll notice revised interfaces in a bunch of places, from the project settings page to G Suite accounts.

2. Donations. While a beta has been kicking around in the settings page for awhile, Donations are redesigned & available for everyone. Your project now has a live page where anyone can donate with a credit card, & the funds will go directly into your account. You can add a custom message (using Markdown) to your donate page if you’d like.

3. A small addition: you can now export your transactions as JSON, in addition to CSV.
4. New icon. Inspired by macOS Big Sur, the previously-flat icon is now 3D-looking & pretty sweet :)

All of this is live for everyone now. More to come! 👀

Thanks to our generous friends over at repl.it, in light of COVID-19, Hack Club Bank users get a free Hacker plan for the next year. Repl.it is an amazing web IDE, where you can get basically any programming language running in your web browser in just a few seconds—regardless of what kind of computer you have. The Hacker plan, normally $84, gives you private projects, unlimited collaborators, & unlimited storage. They’ve generously sponsored many events that have run on Hack Club Bank, and we’re so thankful for their continued support.

To claim your subscription, visit the promo page & click "Apply". It’s limited to the first 500 people who claim it, so don’t wait.

Hope you’re safe & well. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reply & ask away!

Last week, we launched a new feature in Hack Club Bank: Transparency Mode.

With Transparency Mode, you can open source your finances instantly from your account settings page. Why would you want to do that? Nonprofit donors deserve to know what their contributions are funding—as a hackathon/nonprofit, you can talk about what you’re spending money on, but transparency in every transaction builds trust for supporters. It’s already live in action!

• You can see Hack Pennsylvania’s finances here and @lachlanjc made a transparency page showing more details from their event.
• The first event on Hack Club Bank, Hack Chicago, is open here.
• Windy City Hacks open sourced, too.

That’s not all. When Hack Club first started, Zach’s hope was to build a different kind of organization: one not only open source with code, but open source with its finances too. Every month, Zach would painstaking put every transaction on GitHub. Unfortunately, as we grew, the tooling took too long & we had to outsource our books to an accounting firm that didn’t know what GitHub was. We’ll be sharing this publicly next week, but Bank users are getting a sneak peek today: Hack Club HQ has been running entirely on Bank for months now, and our finances are public. Dig in, right here: bank.hackclub.com/hq.

Let’s set a new standard in financial transparency for nonprofits. If you have any questions or feedback on how to improve Transparency Mode, please let us (bank@hackclub.com) know!

Today, we’re announcing with Major League Hacking that Hack Club Bank is the new preferred financial platform for all MLH Member Events.

With this announcement, Cal Hacks, the world’s largest college hackathon, is announcing their switch to Hack Club Bank. Spectra is joining them as well.

Click here to read Linus's full post on this announcement.

Bank can now predict the future! 🌀🎉

If you want to know when your invoices are coming in, or how much money is going to be automatically withdrawn from your account, Bank will now tell you.

Check it out by clicking on either "Incoming Deposits" or "Pending Withdrawals" on your Bank dashboard.

If you've ever wanted to get that old, unpaid invoice off of your invoices page, you now can.

Check it out by clicking "Archive" when you're viewing an invoice. 🚢🎉

You can now upload custom profile pictures on Bank.

Check it out by navigating to the Team page and then selecting the settings icon next to your user. 🎉👌

Have you been stuck with a lame URL like https://bank.hackclub.com/hack-pennsylvania and have wanted to change it to something like https://bank.hackclub.com/hackpenn?

Well, now you can!

Check it out in the your Bank's settings. ✨ ⚡️

We've added a document to all projects that you can give to sponsors confirming that you're fiscally sponsored by Hack Club.

Check it out in your Documents tab! ✨☝️

Have you ever wanted to attach an image or link to a transaction or invoice? Well, now with the addition of Markdown, you can.

Power up your notes now! 🚀

Starting today, there's no longer a fee for accepting credit cards, bank transfers, or any other payment method.

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You've invoiced Balsamiq for $500, they paid via credit card, but you only received $485.20. Where'd that $14.80 go? Welcome to the world of payment processing. (HC Bank uses Stripe)

Payment processing fees are annoying. Calculating them ahead of time is frustrating and the result is always less money for your event, club, or project.

Starting today, Hack Club Bank will make all your payment processing fees disappear.

This means that regardless of whether a sponsor is paying via credit card, ACH, or wire, when you send an invoice for $500, you'll receive $500.

And we're taking it even further.

I'm proud to share we're also reimbursing all previous payment processing fees, from all time, for everyone.

Depending on the size of past invoices, you'll receive somewhere between $4.48 and $390.50 (actual numbers) granted to your HC Bank account this week.

If you want to read more, check out our blog post with the full story.

P.S. We also resigned the invoice page to show you way more details.