Charity Commission launches new online register of charities
06 October 2008
The Charity Commission’s new online register of charities, launched today, now provides a wealth of information on charities and the charity sector.
Visitors to the register will come first to a landing page which gives details about the sector as a whole, including how many charities are registered and how much they are worth, in terms of income and investments.
Once into the register, charities can be searched for by name or number as before, but from today users will be presented with a number of pages relating to each charity’s financial position and other details.
Charities with income above £500,000 – around 9,000 organisations, that together comprise more than 80 per cent of the sector’s income – will have a main overview page that sets out their activities; the countries or English unitary authorities in which they operate; and, in graph or chart format, their income; spending; assets, liabilities and people numbers.
Income is broken down by type, as is expenditure, and the ‘people’ section allows charities to list the number of full-time equivalent staff and also the number of volunteers. Charitable spending is divided into spending on charitable activity and spending on fundraising and governance, and it also shows how much the charity is retaining for its reserves.
A second page provides five years’ worth of financial history (income and expenditure) and compliance history. If a charity is late submitting its accounts, the number of days it was overdue will stay on its public record for five years.
Visitors can still access the charity’s trustees’ annual report and accounts, with these scanned in and presented in PDF format as before. Charities with income over £1m are also obliged to upload their Summary Information Returns.
A contacts page provides a contact name, address and phone number, plus a list of trustees, though the chair is not specified. Visitors need only to click on each trustee name to identify whether they are also trustees elsewhere – and whether the other charities of which they are on the board have submitted their accounts on time.
The search function has also been improved. Charities can be found by keywords, operational location, registration date, the date they were removed from the register, and/or income range. There is also a field to enable visitors to search for charities with overdue accounts.