Charity Commission Reporting

All registered charities must submit an annual return to the Charity Commission.  They have issued guidelines on the layout of the return that differs dependent upon whether your submission is in receipts & payments or accruals format.  The return itself will need to be signed off by an independent examiner or a qualified auditor. 

The principal statements of the return are the Statement of Financial Activities (SOFA) and the Balance Sheet for accruals submissions and the Receipts & Payments Report and Statement of Assets & Liabilities for receipts & payments submissions. In either case, these statements show totals split between the various fund types (unrestricted, restricted and endowment).  The remaining pages of the return are mainly supporting notes.. If proper funds accounting has not been maintained then it can be very tedious and time consuming to extract the required totals for the different fund types.

The Charity Commission website has full details on the recommended layout and content of each return.  The Paxton packages conform to these guidelines for each of the available format options.