Homeroom Fund
School fundraising on the roster you already have
Campaigns attached to real rosters, append-only ledgers, wallets that route to each party’s own account, and a design where a fundraiser gift is never skimmed. One thing first, before any of that: live payment is not turned on, so nothing here can collect a dollar today. The next section is about that, not the one after the features.
Two things this disclosure is not. It is not a soft launch notice, and it is not a waiting list — there is nothing on this page to join and no form asking for your details. We use no third-party advertising or tracking scripts and build no behavioral profile; basic short-lived operational logs may record page requests. It is a statement about which parts of a system are load-bearing today, published in the same place as the claims it qualifies rather than in a footnote at the bottom.
The money path, and exactly where it stops
Below is the whole path a gift would travel, with the step that is switched off drawn as a break rather than left out. This is the honest shape of the product right now: two steps built and reachable, one step off, and two steps built but unreached because nothing gets past the third.
Drawing the break matters more than it might seem. A diagram that simply omitted the rail would show a complete, working path — and a reader would take exactly the wrong thing from it. The gap is the fact.
What is actually built
Each carries its real state. Two of these are marked as waiting on a rail that is off, and one is early access — those labels are the point of the list, not a caveat attached to it.
- Campaigns on a real roster
- Append-only ledgers
- Wallets and payouts
- No skim, by design
- Reconciliation and reporting
- The family store
Campaigns on a real roster
Built and running
A campaign that knows who is actually in the band
A fundraiser is attached to a roster the school already keeps — a team, an ensemble, a class, a club — rather than a spreadsheet somebody exported in September. That is what makes participation, credit, and reporting resolvable without a reconciliation meeting: the campaign and the roster are the same data, not two lists that agree on a good day.
Campaign and roster attachment built · no charge rail attached
Append-only ledgers
Built and running
Money entries that are added, never quietly rewritten
Every money movement is recorded on an add-only ledger: a correction is a new entry that references the one it corrects, not an edit that erases what was there. This is the least glamorous thing on this page and the one an auditor cares about most, because a ledger you can rewrite is a story rather than a record.
Ledger substrate built and running
Wallets and payouts
Rail not turned on
Each party’s share sits in that party’s own account
The model routes each party’s share to that party’s own connected account rather than pooling everything in ours and settling up later. A pooled float is where a skim becomes possible and where a failure becomes everybody’s problem at once. Designing it out is cheaper than promising not to do it.
Wallet and payout engine built · live payout rail NOT turned on
No skim, by design
Built and running
A fundraiser gift is never skimmed
The platform does not take a cut of a fundraiser gift. This is a design commitment about how the product works, and it is stated here in the present tense on purpose: it is a property of the model, not a promotional rate that expires. Where the platform earns is the picture-day store, above a cost floor enforced in code — not out of the middle of a gift a family made to a school.
A design commitment, not a rate · unaffected by the rail being off
Reconciliation and reporting
Built and running
Bank reconciliation, aging, and 1099s as engines, not exports
Aging, bank reconciliation, and 1099 handling are built into the same system the ledgers live in. The practical effect is that the treasurer’s question and the adviser’s question resolve against one set of numbers, rather than an export that was true at the moment it was taken.
Engines built · operating against test and internal data only
The family store
Early access
Where the platform actually earns, when it opens
The consent-gated family store is the earning surface: prints and downloads from picture day, sold above a cost floor enforced in code, with the school earning from the sale. It is in early access — built, opening gradually, not open — and no page of ours takes a payment for it today.
Early access · live payment not turned on
Counted, not asserted
These bars are counted from this page’s own capability list when the page renders, so they cannot drift from the descriptions above. The third one is empty and is supposed to be.
Why an append-only ledger is the part worth caring about
Fundraising software is usually sold on the front end — the campaign page, the share links, the thermometer graphic. The part that decides whether a school trusts the numbers a year later is underneath, and it is dull: can an entry be rewritten in place?
Here it cannot. A money entry is added, and a correction is a new entry that references the one it corrects. The current balance is a consequence of the history rather than a value someone can set. That is what makes a question like “what did this look like in March” answerable at all, and it is why this survives an audit conversation that a rewritable table does not.
It is also the reason the switched-off rail is not a problem for the ledger work: the ledger is not waiting on a processor to be correct. It is correct now, about the entries it holds now, and connecting a rail later adds entries rather than changing the rules.
How school fundraising usually works, and how this is built
This compares two arrangements, not two companies. The left column describes the common shape of a standalone fundraising tool, whoever makes it.
| The question | A standalone fundraising tool | Homeroom Fund |
|---|---|---|
| Whose roster does the campaign run on? | An import, re-uploaded each season | The roster the school already keeps |
| Can a money entry be rewritten in place? | Commonly yes, silently | No -- append-only, corrections are new entries |
| Is a cut taken out of a gift? | Typically a percentage of every gift | No skim on a fundraiser gift, by design |
| Where does the money sit before payout? | Pooled with the vendor, settled later | Routed to each party's own connected account |
| Is a live charge rail connected today? | Yes -- that is the whole product | No. Not turned on, and this page says so first |
| Does reporting reconcile with the school's other numbers? | A separate export to reconcile by hand | Same ledgers as aging, 1099s, and reconciliation |
Note the fifth row. A comparison table that quietly omitted the one line where the other column wins would be exactly the kind of thing this page exists not to do.
Questions a treasurer or a booster lead should ask
Can our school collect money through this today?
No. Live payment is not turned on. The campaign, ledger, wallet, and reporting engines are built, but there is no charge rail connected behind them, so nothing on this page and nothing in the product will take a dollar from a family right now. We would rather you read that in the first sentence than discover it after a planning meeting.
Then why publish the page at all?
Because the engines are real and a school evaluating a platform deserves to see what is actually built, labelled honestly, rather than a page that appears when the rail does. A page that only exists once everything is on teaches a reader nothing about whether the vendor tells the truth in the meantime -- which is the thing that is hardest to check and matters most.
What does 'a fundraiser gift is never skimmed' mean exactly?
The platform does not take a percentage or a fee out of a gift a family makes to a school fundraiser. It is a statement about how the product is designed rather than a promotional rate, which is why it is written in the present tense even while the rail is off -- the design does not change when the switch flips. Where the platform earns is the picture-day store, above a cost floor enforced in code.
What does the school pay for the platform?
The core platform is free to the school: no per-seat license and no per-student fee. This page quotes no price for anything, because the only paid surface is the family store and it is in early access with live payment not turned on.
What is an append-only ledger and why should a treasurer care?
It means a money entry is added and never rewritten in place; a correction is a new entry that points at the one it corrects. The reason to care is that it changes what an audit can establish. On a rewritable ledger, the current state is the only thing you can see. On an add-only ledger, the history is the record, so a question about what happened has an answer that does not depend on trusting the person who could have edited it.
Where does the money physically sit when the rail is on?
The design routes each party's share to that party's own connected account rather than pooling it in ours and settling later. Raw card data never touches our servers. We are describing the model rather than a running system, and we are not naming a processor, because we are not going to imply a connection we have not turned on.
Is this the same thing as the standalone fundraising site?
Related, not identical. This page is the Homeroom-brand facet: fundraising as a module of the platform a school already runs, on the roster it already has. The standalone property approaches the same engines from the fundraising side for a school that is not running the whole platform. Same honest-off posture on both -- the rail is off in either doorway.
How will we know when it changes?
This page will change, in the same plain language. We are not going to leave a switched-off disclosure standing after the switch flips, and we are not going to remove it before. If you are reading a sentence on this page that says live payment is not turned on, that is the current state at the time this page was published, not a leftover.
Where this sits
Fundraising is one module of a platform a school runs on. The whole-platform answer is at homeroom.software, the image library that the family store sells from is at homeroom.gallery, and the parent-facing view of the same honesty posture is at homeroom.family.
The core platform is free to the school — no per-seat license, no per-student fee. That is not a launch offer; it is how the model is meant to work, which is also why the earning surface is a store a family opts into rather than a bill the school receives.