The new charity reporting rules ask for impact. Here's what SORP 2026 impact reporting means for you

If your charity's financial year started on or after 1 January 2026, your next annual report falls under new rules. They're called the Charities SORP, and the 2026 version was published last October by the Charity Commission and the other UK charity regulators.

Most of what's been written about it is aimed at accountants. This is for whoever actually has to write the report.

Impact is now a requirement

The biggest change to the written part of your annual report is easy to describe. According to the regulators' own summary of changes, reporting your impact "is now a 'must' for all charities". You also need to explain how you're handling environmental, social and governance issues.

Impact doesn't means saying what changed because of your work, as well as what you did. "We ran 42 sessions for 380 young people" describes activity. "290 of those young people were still coming six months later" starts to describe a difference. You probably already have numbers like that somewhere. The job is getting them to the person writing the report in time.

We don't measure impact ourselves. If you don't have those numbers yet, evaluation partners like Ethical Good and Relativ Impact can help you find them.

Most charities will find this harder than it sounds

When the Charity Commission last reviewed the quality of a representative sample of charity accounts, in 2018, only seven in ten met its basic standard. The most common problem was that charities gave little or no information about what they actually did.

So the thing charities have found hardest to report is now the thing they're required to report. That's a good reason to start in the autumn rather than the spring.

The good news is that the rules scale with size, and most charities are in the lightest group. Charity Commission figures from January 2026 show 156,340 of the 171,228 registered charities have income under £500,000. That's more than nine in ten.

Why a new section can cost more than it should

Adding a section to a report sounds small. It stops being small when the report is rebuilt from scratch every year. A new required section means a new brief for the designer, more pages, more layout time and another full round of proofing because everything has moved. And the rules will change again.

We call this the reporting tax: paying the full rebuild price every time something changes, because your report has no permanent home.

How Yarra One handles it

We turn the report you produce every year into a web-based reporting system your own team runs. We build it once, around the report you already have, with views for the different people who read it: trustees, funders and the public. After that, your team logs in and updates it without needing us or a developer.

When the rules add an impact section, it goes into the system once and stays there. Next year's report starts from this year's rather than a blank page. And because previous years sit alongside the current one, showing change over time, which is what an impact section asks for, becomes a matter of looking rather than digging.

Our entry tier is £1,500 to build and £200 a month to run.

If your year end is coming up and the new impact section is already on your mind, book a call and we'll show you what your report would look like built this way.