Product
Filings drafted, officers approve
OpenBooks turns categorized books into a drafted filing, waiting for approval. Deadlines, unclassified dollars, and anything that breaks the chain surface early — with runway to act. An officer approves before anything is filed or published. It is not legal or tax advice.
Draft → officer approves → ready to submit.
Draft-first
The filing is prepared from the live books; you review rather than assemble from scratch.
Early warnings
Deadlines and anomalies surface with time to act, not after the fact.
Officer approval
A human always approves before a filing or public disclosure goes out.
The deadline should never be the first warning
Filing failures are rarely a surprise in hindsight. The dollars were uncategorized for months, the reconciliation had drifted, the treasurer changed in March — and none of it surfaced until a form was due. By then the only options are bad ones.
OpenBooks watches the conditions that predict a bad filing rather than the date alone: unclassified dollars accumulating, an account that stopped reporting, entries that would not survive verification. Those surface while there is still runway to fix them, which is the only time a warning is worth anything.
Commitments, not just transactions
Compliance is broader than arithmetic. Organizations make commitments — in bylaws, in policies, to donors, to members — and are judged on whether they kept them. "No reimbursement over $500 without board approval" is a rule your books should enforce, not a sentence in a document nobody reads.
OpenBooks lets you state commitments like that in plain English and checks activity against them as it happens. A violation lands in the approval queue with the policy it broke cited alongside it, so the exception is a decision someone makes on the record rather than something discovered later.
A human always says yes
Nothing is filed and nothing is published without an officer approving it. The agent prepares; a person decides. That boundary is not a setting to be switched off, because the accountability for a filing belongs to the officer who signs it.
OpenBooks does not provide legal or tax advice. Deadlines and thresholds in the regulations reference are sourced from regulators and link back to the original — always confirm against the authority before you file.