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Late filers heavily targeted in new online register

Finance | Tania Mason | 1 Oct 2008

The Charity Commission’s new online register of charities will allow anybody to discover, at the click of a mouse, whether a trustee is on the board of other charities and whether those charities are late filing their accounts.

The trustee search function is one of several new functions built in to the new register, which launches today.

Visitors to the register will come first to a landing page which gives details about the sector as a whole, including how many charities are registered and how much they are worth, in terms of income and investments.

Once into the register, charities can be searched for by name or number as before, but from today users will be presented with a number of pages relating to each charity’s financial position and other details.

Charities with income above £500,000 – around 9,000 organisations that together comprise more than 80 per cent of the sector’s income – will have a main overview page that sets out their activities; the countries or English unitary authorities in which they operate; and, in graph or chart format, their income; spending; assets, liabilities and people numbers.

As revealed by Charity News Alert (24 September 2008), the border at the top of the page will be red or green depending on whether the charity’s latests accounts were submitted on time.

Income is broken down by type, as is expenditure, and the ‘people’ section allows charities to list the number of full-time equivalent staff and also the number of volunteers. Charitable spending is divided into spending on charitable activity and spending on fundraising and governance, and it also shows how much the charity is retaining for its reserves.

Online submission takes 15 minutes

All figures are married to the SORP categories, so charities entering the data onto the Commission’s website needn’t do any extra work other than the time spent filling in the online annual return form. Beta testing shows that most charities take no more than 15 minutes to complete the form, according to the Commission.

A second page provides five years’ worth of financial history (income and expenditure) and compliance history. If a charity is late submitting its accounts, the number of days it was overdue will stay on its public record for five years.

Visitors can still access the charity’s trustees’ annual report and accounts, with these scanned in and presented in PDF format as before. Charities with income over £1m are also obliged to upload their Summary Information Returns.

A contacts page provides a contact name, address and phone number, plus a list of trustees, though the chair is not specified. Visitors need only to click on each trustee name to identify whether they are also trustees elsewhere – and whether the other charities of which they are on the board have submitted their accounts on time.

Charities with income of less than £500,000 will have simpler, shorter entries with overview, contacts and legal framework pages. All entries, however, can be collated into a colour report, branded with the Commission logo, and printed off. Such reports will be particularly useful for charities that need to prove their charity status to banks, the Commission said.

Advanced search function

The search function has also been improved. Charities can be found by keywords, operational location, registration date, the date they were removed from the register, and/or income range. There is also a field to enable visitors to search for charities with overdue accounts.

As soon as charities upload their information, it appears on the site the following day.

Mark Pinfold, the Commission’s head of charity information, said the timing of the register was fortuitous because as the credit crunch bites, it would be easier for the public to “see how close to the edge charities are”.

The Commission has already notified the 9,000 biggest charities that the register would be overhauled, and advised them that if they are concerned they might have made a mistake on their latest annual return, they should check it and make any corrections before today.

Pinfold added that the accessibility of the information would be very helpful to other organisations that use charity data, such as Intelligent Giving, as they will now find it easier to contribute their narrative without needing to extract and analyse the figures first.

The register also has a feedback function, and the Commission is keen to hear what charities think of it in order to improve it further. Phase two may include better sector analysis, for instance division by cause or by service delivery charities, or separation of funders from other types of charity.

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