FoundationIncorporation

Currently when it comes to dealing with monetary stuffs, especially when dealing with sponsoring companies, we depend on one of our partners to become a fiscal host for us. There have been some discussions about the prospect of incorporating a foundation, so that the group can self-manage all money. Documenting our financials is easy for us because we track all our financial contributions and expenses online and we make our balance tracking sheets public. The hard part may be other legal/paperwork/admistrative/logistics stuff. However our group has many software developers, so there may be some possibility to automate most of it (we are still not sure whether this is a problem that is worth spending time tackling or not, but it might be really cool to have an open source foundation where everything is completely transparent, i.e. on GitHub). However there may be other factors. We’re still not sure whether to start a foundation or not, but this page is here to document the body of knowledge, factors, and requirements.

Readings and resources:

Prerequisites

Name
Principal office along with document that permits the use of that space
At least 3 people on the board
500,000 THB of cash (maybe reduced to 200,000 THB?)
Regulations
An approved auditor?

Eligibility criteria in Thailand

Microsoft
- Organizations must be registered with or recognized by relevant authorities as: (1) tax exempt organizations; (2) public benefit organizations; (3) foundations or associations; or (4) foreign NGOs.
Google
- Organizations must be currently registered with TechSoup Asia, TechSoup Global's regional arm.
- Organizations must be registered with or recognized by relevant authorities as: (1) tax exempt organizations; (2) public benefit organizations; (3) foundations or associations; or (4) foreign NGOs.

Discussions

@dtinth: After discussing with a friend, he recommends incorporating a private company instead. There will be less ceremony involved in running the company, and expenses can be used to deduct the corporate income tax. However, the name may not be as cool, and we cannot apply for non-profit offers, since although our group is non-profit, it is not officially recognized as such.
- @chayapatr: It would be more ideal if we can benefit from non-profit offers. e.g. Azure
- @dtinth: Also for a foundation, donations are not considered taxable income as per section 2.5 of this PDF but again a lot of documentation involved.
@dtinth: There seems to be a lot of formal meetings and documentations involved. Can these meetings be held asynchronously or conducted on Facebook Messenger or Discord? Can some of the required documentations be automated in some ways?
@dtinth: After chatting with p-Pop, after the foundation is running for 3 years and have audited financial track record that at least 70% of the costs go to public good and at most 30% for operations.