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Example, annual charity accounts templates, including Charity Commission FRS102 and small charity receipts and payments accounts templates. Plus lots more CIO and small charity accounts and finance resources - SORP, Charity Commission annual reports, finance policy templates, UK bank accounts, budgeting, and forecasting, cost control and sustainability toolkits. These work for anyone but are particularly aimed at helping with small charity accounts.
Charities often struggle to find the right Charity Commission annual accounts templates and finance guidance, so I've pasted these in below. There is also sometimes confusion between cash and accrual accounting - the difference is one of timing. If you record income or expenses when you pay or receive money, it’s cash based accounting. If you do it when you receive a bill or raise an invoice, it’s accruals based accounting. Often, small charities use cash based accounting and larger ones accruals.
Creating a charity budget and forecasting fundraising income is notoriously difficult. This guide provides budgeting worked examples, templates and a range of practical techniques you can use. Click here for small charity budget and cash flow accounts templates and webinars.
A template with everything you need for your charity annual report and charity annual accounts. Here's what you need to know and do to prepare and submit your annual report and accounts, with links to all the resources you'll need, including the Charity Commission login.
A practical guide to charity independent examination and audit reports of charity annual accounts, including thresholds, the difference between audit and independent examination, and how to find an auditor or independent examiner, with links to all the resources and Charity Commission guidance you'll need.
Listed below are a range of other charity finance resources, templates and policies.
This is just a very small selection of the accounts and finance resources within Charity Excellence, which enables you to assess your accounts and financial management in 30 mins and connects you to a huge range of free resources and support.
Find Funding, Free Help & Resources - Everything Is Free.
Our friends at ICAEW have a Charity Community for accounts professionals, trustees and charity management that is free to join and gives you access to a huge range of free finance training, resources and webinars to enable you to stay up-to-date on everything.
Their next annual Charity Finance Conference will be held on 18 and 19 January 2024.
I have an ACCA qualification, but I'm not an accountant and, being Scottish, prefer securing funding to counting it. However, (to give it its full name) the Accounting and Reporting by Charities: Statement of Recommended Practice (SORP) is important in preparing charity accounts, except for small charities not required to use it. The ICAEW are proper accountants, so the best thing to do is to go to their SORP web page which has accounts templates and pretty much everything SORP related to make even the most jaded accountant happy.
What you need to think about to open or set up a free UK charity bank or savings account for your charity, community group, club or society, how to do that and a review of the best, including Charity Commission guidance on banking.
There have been so many problems with charity accounts that I've also created a guide on how to deal with these.
We fail to claim £600m pa in Gift Aid alone and that’s just one of many HMRC charity tax and VAT reliefs and exemptions, which you can claim up to 4 years retrospectively. Here are details of all of these, with links to the HMRC guidance, so you can claim yours.
This resource summarises the HMRC Gift Aid Rules for charities and provides guidance on what it is and how to claim it, including the 14 different ways to claim Gift Aid, the Small Donations Scheme (GASDS), declarations, records, how far back a charity can claim, limits, with links to everything you need to claim yours.
You have to register your charity or CASC with HMRC to claim Gift Aid. This guidance gives you practical step-by-step instructions on applying for HMRC charity registration, so you can claim everything you're entitled to.
At the outset of Covid, I created a series of 7 toolkits and a funder list - the initial ones were accessed nearly 40,000 times. These are the finance ones. Essentially, these are good financial management practices turned into toolkits that anyone can use. I couldn't put the posh versions into the Resource Hub, but you can download these from within the system finance & resources questionnaire.
This charity financial management checklist and template, enable you to assess and respond to finance risk for your risk register and reserves, or to create your sustainability plan.
A simpler, small charity version of the of the charity financial planning template. It enables you to easily assess and respond to financial risk, for your risk register and reserves policy.
How to improve financial management in 20+ areas, to reduce your charity budget expenditure - overheads, expenses, administration and operating costs, without cost cutting. These can be significant and, even small savings add up, pay you back every month and the funding saved is always 'unrestricted'.
This toolkit provides a checklist of ways to reduce and manage charity cash requirements in a crisis or emergency, to prevent your charity closing or insolvency. It identifies 20 ways in which you can generate more cash, to buy you time to implement a recovery plan.
This charity risk management policy guide explains the basics of risk management and assessment. It gives you a simple 3 step process to use and sample templates for your own risk policy and risk register and includes having a charity reserves policy. It can be used for everything from trustee risk planning to assessing and managing charity shop and fundraising event risk.
This resource provides an example reserves policy template, explains why a reserves policy is important, what you should include, the different types of financial reserves, questions to ask yourself and links to resources to help you. It is a simple guide to the Charity Commission CC19 guidance on reserves and is aimed primarily at small charities.
A charity due diligence template for checks on donors, partners contractors or others to help ensure problems will not arise in working with them and comply with donor rules & regulations. This includes links to Charity Commission due diligence compliance toolkits and checklists for donors and partners.
This 3 step checklist gives you a simple process to evaluate and compare charity project and fundraising proposals.
A registered charity ourselves, the CEF works for any non profit, not just charities.
Plus, 100+downloadable funder lists, 40+ policies, 8 online health checks and the huge resource base.
Quick, simple and very effective.
Find Funding, Free Help & Resources - Everything Is Free.
I have worked in the sector at senior level for many years and hold various professional qualifications but am not an accountant, nor a lawyer and no advice can be applicable to all organisations, in all circumstances, so this resource is no more than a guide to understanding. Essentially, I've summarised the wide ranging and detailed regulatory guidance and augmented this with my own experience and Internet research to create a layman's guide, with links to the source guidance. I hope you found it useful, but I am not competent to provide professional advice. If you need it, use Help Finder to find pro bono support.
