Who can actually edit your report? Understanding who owns your document right?
Every report has somewhere its words and numbers live before they're published. For a lot of charities, that place is a design file on a freelancer's laptop, a Word document called FINAL_v7, or a website account set up by someone who left two years ago.
It's worth finding out which, because it decides whether your team can change a figure without paying somebody.
How it goes wrong
The same stories come up again and again. A designer produced a great report, then moved on, and the original files either never arrived or won't open without fonts the charity doesn't own. A report was built on a website tool under a former staff member's email address, and now nobody can log in to fix last year's figures on the homepage. Or the team does have access, but every edit is so fiddly that changes go back to the supplier at an hourly rate.
This hits smaller organisations hardest. Charity Commission figures from January 2026 show more than nine in ten registered charities have income under £500,000. Most of them have no digital team and nobody whose job is reading supplier contracts.
It's also a matter for trustees. Charity Commission guidance says trustees must look after the charity's assets and keep proper records, and your report is part of that record.
Five questions to ask any supplier
Ask these before you commission anything, including from us.
Can our staff log in and change the text and numbers without you?
Can you show me someone doing it, rather than describing it?
Who owns the web address and the hosting account?
What happens to our report if you stop trading?
Is there a charge for each edit or each user?
A supplier who answers all five comfortably is offering you something you control. One who gets vague is offering you a rental, which may be fine, as long as everyone knows that's what it is.
What sits behind a Yarra One report
Every report we build comes with its own editor, known as a content management system or CMS, which your team logs into. It's organised around your report rather than a generic template, so if you report by programme, your programmes are in there. Your team can update figures, add sections and publish whenever they need to, without waiting for us or a developer.
That design work matters more than people expect. An editor nobody can use is worse than a Word document, and we've been brought in to replace systems that failed for exactly that reason. So the first weeks of every build go on understanding how your report is really put together and who reads it, and the editor is shaped around what we find.
Our entry tier is £1,500 to build and £200 a month to run.
If you're not sure who can currently edit your own report, book a call. We'll look at what you have and tell you plainly what it would take to bring it in-house.
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