Charity Commission publishes 35,000 charities' accounts online
Howard Lake | 8 September 2005 | News
The Charity Commission’s website now includes the accounts of 35,000 charities, available to the public in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF).
This is the latest in a series of improvements to the Charity Commission’s website and part of a programme to upgrade the services offered to the Commission’s charity stakeholders and members of the public.
The Commission has been working on improving the public information available on charities, following the recommendations of the 2002 Strategy Unit report.
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Another element of this is the new summary information return, which charities with annual incomes of over £1 million will complete for the first time as part of this year’s annual return.
However, because the accounts are based on scanned images rather than actual text imports, the Commission warns users that some of the reports might not be wholly legible. In addition, the content of the accounts and trustees’ reports may not conform to best practice. Also, a small minority of charities do not submit their accounts to the Commission, so some records may be absent.
Further developments from the Commission in the next few months include an enhanced web search facility on the charity register, the submission of accounts and annual returns electronically and online charity registration.
The Commission is also investing in an internal electronic records document management system, known as CeRIS, to replace the 700,000 paper files it currently holds. This system went live last month.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.