What trustees are signing when they approve the annual report?

Most trustees see the annual report once, as a finished PDF in a board pack, the week before the meeting where they approve it. By then there are only two real choices: approve it, or delay it.

So it helps to know what you're putting your name to.

Every trustee is responsible

Charity Commission guidance is clear on this. The trustees who sign the annual report and accounts sign on behalf of the whole board, so every trustee is responsible for them. That includes the one who joined last month and the one who read the pack on the train.

Filing on time isn't the same as reporting well

Charities have become very good at filing. In the Charity Commission's latest annual return figures, almost 97% of charities that had to file had done so, up from about 93% the year before. Quality is a different story. The last time the Commission reviewed a representative sample of charity accounts, in 2018, only seven in ten met its basic standard. Filed, in other words, doesn't mean good.

Four questions for the approval meeting

1. Can we back up every claim in here? If a number can't be traced to someone inside the organisation, it should come out.

2. Is the section on our reserves, the money we hold back, still true, or has it been copied forward from last year? This is the thing we find most often in a first review.

3. Does it say what changed because of our work? New charity reporting rules now require impact reporting from every charity, so a list of activities is no longer enough.

4. Does anything in the written story contradict the accounts? It happens more than you'd expect, usually because two people wrote the two halves at different times.

The real problem is timing

Boards review the report late because it arrives late. A half-finished PDF isn't something anyone sends to trustees, so everything waits until the end, and by the end the only thing left to change is the cover.

This is one of the main reasons organisations come to Yarra One. We turn your annual report into a web-based system your team runs, and your trustees can have their own view of it. That means you can share sections as they're ready: the finances with your treasurer in January, the impact section before anyone has chosen the photos. Trustees get time to ask proper questions while the answers can still change the report. And next year, it starts from this year's version rather than from scratch.

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

If your board is about to approve a report nobody has seen in draft, book a call and we'll show you how next year could run differently.