# Charity Commission publishes 35,000 charities' accounts online

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/2005/09/08/charity-commission-publishes-35000-charities039-accounts-online/
- Published: 2005-09-08T23:00:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

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.

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.

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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.

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