opencollective-py: Manage OpenCollective from your terminal or Claude Code

I manage PolicyEngine’s OpenCollective. We use OpenCollective because it gives anyone full visibility into our finances—every expense, donation, and transaction is public. It also handles crowdfunding, recurring donations, and community updates, and the platform itself is open source.

But submitting expenses, reviewing pending ones, approving reimbursements—it all meant clicking through a web UI.

So I built opencollective-py—a Python client that handles OpenCollective operations programmatically. It includes a CLI for quick terminal commands and an MCP server so Claude Code can manage expenses directly.

What it does

Submit expenses—reimbursements (with receipts) or invoices (for services):

oc reimbursement "Conference registration" 500.00 receipt.pdf -c policyengine
oc invoice "Consulting - January" 2000.00 -c policyengine

List and filter expenses:

oc expenses -c policyengine --pending
oc expenses -c policyengine --status approved

Approve or reject (for collective admins):

oc approve exp-abc123
oc reject exp-def456

Get account info:

oc me

Python client

from opencollective import OpenCollectiveClient

client = OpenCollectiveClient(access_token="...")

# Submit expenses
client.submit_reimbursement("policyengine", "Travel", 50000, "receipt.pdf")
client.submit_invoice("policyengine", "Consulting", 200000)

# Manage expenses
expenses = client.list_expenses("policyengine", status="PENDING")
client.approve_expense("exp-abc123")
client.reject_expense("exp-def456")

MCP server for Claude Code

Add to your Claude Code config:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "opencollective": {
      "command": "python",
      "args": ["-m", "opencollective.mcp_server"]
    }
  }
}

Then manage expenses in natural language: “Show me pending expenses for PolicyEngine” or “Submit my AWS receipt as a $150 reimbursement.”

HTML receipt conversion

Many email receipts are HTML. OpenCollective only accepts images and PDFs. The package automatically converts HTML to PDF:

oc reimbursement "AWS bill" 150.00 aws-receipt.html -c policyengine

Get it

pip install opencollective

# With PDF conversion
pip install "opencollective[pdf]"

Then authenticate:

oc auth

Project page ・ PyPI ・ GitHub

This is an unofficial community project, not affiliated with OpenCollective.