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This guide outlines what the law in England and Wales says a charity is.
How to use internal financial controls to manage your charity’s financial activity and protect it from fraud and loss.
Understand the rules and risks when using charity funds to pay a trustee or a person or organisation connected to a trustee.
Samples showing the layout and format of trustees’ annual reports and accounts under SORP 2005. For samples under SORP FRSSE and SORP FRS 102, see detail below.
Directions and guidance the examiner must follow and the role and responsibility of independent examiners when examining the accounts of a charity.
Guidance about making trustee decisions, including the 7 decision-making principles.
How to decide what your charity’s purposes are and write them in the ‘objects’ clause of your governing document.
Find out about the rules you must follow to govern your charity.
Use our online service to keep your charity’s information and contact details up-to-date with the Charity Commission.
Find out how to make sure that your charity’s money is safe, properly used and accounted for.
How trustees set up their Charity Commission Account.
Read about the sorts of concerns and complaints about charities to raise with the charity regulator. This guidance is now the Commission’s Regulatory and Risk Framework.
Find out about your responsibilities to keep everyone who comes into contact with your charity safe from harm: this includes volunteers, staff and beneficiaries.
How to change your charity structure, for example from unincorporated to a CIO or charitable company.
Find out what sort of wrongdoing you can report to the Charity Commission, and how to report it.
Find out how to pay less tax as a charity and when to set up a subsidiary trading company.
How to register your charity once it has been set up, what you need before you start your application and what happens after you apply.
Understand what information you will need to prepare for the Annual Return 2025, and why new questions have been included.
Charity trustees must 'have regard' to the Charity Commission's public benefit guidance when carrying out activities to which it's relevant.
A charity's objects are a statement of its purposes - they must be exclusively charitable.
Don’t include personal or financial information like your National Insurance number or credit card details.
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