http://www.enaidaccountancy.co.uk/

Enaid Accountancy, Hood Road, Barry (2026)

11/09/2026

Trustee identity verification is not a one off.

A lot of boards ticked it off in late 2025 and moved on. That is not how it works.

From 18 November 2025 identity verification became a legal requirement for company directors and people with significant control. In a charitable company that means every trustee, because your trustees are your directors.

- Existing trustees verify by your next confirmation statement
- New trustees must verify before they are appointed

Every future appointment now carries an admin step before the person can join your board. With regular turnover, you will do it again and again.

Then April 2028. Companies House withdraws paper filing and its web filing service for accounts. Everything goes through compliant software in iXBRL format, including small and micro entities, and the abridged accounts option is removed. If you self file through the Companies House website today, you will need software, someone trained to use it, or an adviser to file for you.

If your charity has a trading subsidiary or secured lending, the Companies House side of your life buys you something real. If you are grant funded with one bank account and no borrowing, it is increasingly two rulebooks for one charity.

That is why charitable company to CIO conversion is back on trustee agendas. If your board has never properly weighed it up, that is a conversation worth having before your next year end.

Speak to the team: enaidaccountancy.co.uk/contact

Source: Companies House guidance and GOV.UK

07/09/2026

The question about reserves has quietly flipped.

For years the pressure was on trustees to justify why they were holding money back. The Charity Commission's updated reserves guidance changed the emphasis: now trustees are expected to justify not holding reserves.

Your reserves policy should:

- Be based on the actual risks your charity and beneficiaries face
- State the level of reserves held and why that level is right
- Appear clearly in your trustees' annual report

With income under pressure and reserves being drawn down across the sector, "we spend everything on the cause" is no longer a safe position on its own. It needs a reasoned policy behind it.

As we have said before, cash in the bank is not the same as financial health. A good reserves policy is what connects the two. If yours is a paragraph copied three years ago, this is the month to revisit it. SORP 2026 also changes how reserves, risks and strategy are reported.

Writing reserves policies that hold up to scrutiny is part of what we do. Happy to look at yours: [email protected]

Source: Charity Commission reserves guidance (CC19), gov.uk

04/09/2026

Every set of accounts we prepare represents people.

Earlier this year our director Andy was a guest at the 15th birthday celebration for Orchestras for All, held in the Speaker's House at the Palace of Westminster and hosted by Sir Lindsay Hoyle. We have worked with the charity since 2017.

Orchestras for All removes the barriers that keep young people out of music: cost, distance, disability, confidence. Its National Orchestra for All brings together around 100 young musicians from across the UK, many of whom would never otherwise play in an ensemble.

Watching that work up close is a reminder of what sits behind the spreadsheets. A child who found their feet, a community that held together. That is why, for us, charity finance is never just numbers.

It also shapes how we work. A charity doing that kind of work needs its finance function to be quiet, accurate and out of the way, so the people running it can get on with the thing they are actually there to do.

You can read more about our work with Orchestras for All here: https://www.enaidaccountancy.co.uk/clients/orchestras-for-all/

02/09/2026

The Charity Commission has rewritten CC27, its guidance on trustee decision-making. The legal duties are unchanged. The document is shorter and in plainer English, now around a 12-minute read against 24 for the old version.

The reason behind the rewrite is the part to pay attention to. The Commission's 2024 research found only 26% of trustees used its guidance more often than other sources. Most relied on a colleague or another trustee instead. For a regulator whose main audience is trustees, that is a frank admission the guidance was not landing with the people it was written for.

Two themes come up whenever the Commission looks at where boards fall short. One is making decisions collectively rather than deferring to a single voice. The other is how those decisions get recorded.

Both have a direct financial edge. A reserves decision, a significant grant, a call to draw down restricted income: these are the ones most likely to be examined later, by a funder, by an examiner, or by the regulator. A sound decision that is badly recorded reads, on paper, like a weak one.

This is not about producing more paperwork. A board that decides together and writes down its reasoning has the evidence to stand behind its judgement. A board that does neither is exposed even when the call was right.

Making the guidance shorter removes the usual excuse for not reading it. The expectation behind it has not softened. If your board wants to sharpen how it handles and records financial decisions, our training covers this ground.

28/08/2026

On 5 February 2026 the charitable purpose soft opt-in came into force under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025. It is one of the bigger changes to charity fundraising in years, and plenty of organisations have not yet worked through what it means for them.

In short, charities can now send marketing by email, text and direct message to people who have expressed an interest in or offered to support their charitable purpose, without obtaining prior consent, provided the conditions are met. The Direct Marketing Association estimates the change could be worth around £290 million a year in extra donations across the sector.

The detail is where it matters.

It is not retrospective. The exemption only covers contact details collected from 5 February 2026 onwards. Supporters already on your database before that date are not included, and treating them as though they are would be a breach. On top of that, the marketing has to further your charitable purposes, and you have to offer a clear way to opt out both when you collect someone's details and in every message you send.

There is a finance angle here that gets lost in the fundraising and legal write-ups. The value of this change depends entirely on the quality of your data capture from now on. A new supporter recorded properly, with the right opt-out in place, is income you can plan around. One captured loosely is income you cannot. That makes it a planning question for finance leads and trustees, not only the fundraising team.

The rules reward organisations that understand the conditions and apply them consistently, which is worth building across everyone who handles supporter data rather than leaving with one team. Our training covers the financial and governance side of changes like this.

26/08/2026

AI isn't just a tool your team is using. It's also a tool being used against you.

Around a third of UK charities suffered a cyber breach or attack in the last year. For those with income over £500,000, that figure rises to two thirds. Only about a third of charities currently have cyber insurance.

What's changed recently is the sophistication of the attacks. AI has made it cheap and fast to produce convincing phishing emails, cloned voices, and fake documents. The poorly written invoice scam from 2018 has been replaced by something far harder to spot.

Finance teams are the front line for this. Three patterns worth watching for.

1. Voice cloning of senior staff.

Attackers are using a few seconds of audio, taken from a video, a webinar, or a podcast, to clone a CEO or finance director's voice. The cloned voice then leaves a voicemail asking for an urgent payment. If your authorisation process relies on "I recognised their voice", that protection is gone.

2. AI-written invoices and supplier change requests.

Emails asking for a change of bank details for an existing supplier are no longer riddled with typos. They read perfectly. They reference real recent meetings. They use the right tone. Your safeguard has to be a process, not a hunch.

3. Fake funder communications.

Particularly damaging for charities. AI-generated emails impersonating funders, asking for fresh financial information or "updated payment details" for grant payments. They often arrive at credible moments in the funding cycle.

What works against this:
A fixed process for any payment or supplier change above a defined threshold. Independent verification through a known phone number, never the one in the email. A short standing item at finance committee meetings asking what attempted attacks the team has seen that quarter. Cyber insurance reviewed against actual exposure.

Trustees are responsible for financial controls. AI hasn't changed that. It has just changed what those controls need to look like.

If your charity hasn't reviewed its finance controls against current AI-driven threats, it's overdue. Speak to the team if you'd like a hand.

Sources: UK Government Cyber Security Breaches Survey (DSIT); Markel UK, "The five biggest risks UK charities will face in 2026."

24/08/2026

The Charity Commission has published new grant-making guidance, and the timing tells you most of what you need to know.

Grant-making charities awarded £17.84 billion in 2024, up from £16.97 billion the year before, with £12 billion of that going to other charities. Demand for charitable services has tripled across England and Wales, and the financial squeeze is now in its third year running.

Against that, the guidance restates something boards often treat as a box-tick: due diligence before funds are committed. Trustees should understand how a recipient organisation operates, confirm it is genuine, and be able to monitor that the grant is spent as agreed. A written agreement should be in place. Where the recipient is not itself a charity, the obligation to assess and manage risk goes up, because that organisation sits outside the framework charities work within.

It is worth being honest about why this bites now. When money is tight, grant-making gets more scrutiny, not less, and a funding decision that cannot be evidenced or monitored becomes the board's problem rather than the recipient's.

The practical version is unglamorous. Clear funding criteria. A recipient check that goes past a quick look at a website. A written agreement, and a decision recorded properly in the minutes. None of it is hard, and all of it is easier to do before the grant goes out than to reconstruct afterwards.

We carry out financial control audits for charities that mirror Charity Commission guidance, ending with a board-level report and recommendations on internal controls. If your grant-making processes have not been looked at recently, speak to the team.

21/08/2026

Some charities are about to need less scrutiny, not more. Whether that is good news depends on who is asking.

From 30 September 2026 the thresholds change in England and Wales:

- Independent examination threshold rises from £25,000 to £40,000 of income
- Audit threshold rises to £1.5 million of income

If your income sits between £25,000 and £40,000, you may no longer be legally required to have an independent examination. If you are near £1 million, you may drop below the audit line.

Two things to be clear about:

1. Which rules apply depends on your year end. A December 2026 year end is assessed against the new thresholds. An earlier year end may still fall under the current ones.
2. "Not required" does not mean "not worth it". Funders, banks and boards often still want the assurance an examination gives. It is also a useful health check, not just a compliance tick.

The saving is real for smaller charities. The judgement call is whether to keep the check anyway. That is a conversation worth having before your next year end, not after.

Not sure which side of the line you fall on? That is exactly the kind of question we answer every week. Drop us a line: enaidaccountancy.co.uk/contact

(Scottish and NI charities: your thresholds work differently, so ask us about your specific rules.)

Source: Charity Commission, gov.uk/guidance/changes-to-charity-accounting-and-reporting

19/08/2026

Converting to a CIO will not get you out of an audit.

It is the most common assumption trustees bring to this decision, and it is wrong. Audit and independent examination thresholds sit in charity law. They apply by income and assets, not by legal form. Changing from a charitable company to a CIO does not move you below a threshold.

What conversion does change:

- One regulator instead of two. No confirmation statement, no Companies House accounts deadline, no separate register to maintain.
- No trustee identity verification. Since 18 November 2025 every trustee of a charitable company is caught by the Companies House regime, and every new trustee must verify before appointment.
- No 2028 software mandate. From 1 April 2028 company accounts must be filed through compliant software in iXBRL format. CIOs sit outside it.
- Receipts and payments accounts become possible below the income threshold. Company law prohibits this for a charitable company at any size. From 30 September 2026 that threshold rises to £500,000.

What it does not change: your annual accounts, your trustees' annual report, your annual return, your examination basis, and SORP 2026 if you prepare accruals accounts. The workload does not disappear. At best it halves.

And some charities should not go near it. Secured borrowing, a trading subsidiary, funder consents you have not asked for, or an objects change you still want to make. Any of those and the answer is stay a company for now.

Our full trustee guide covers what you gain, what you give up, the step by step process, and a five point test for your next board meeting: https://www.enaidaccountancy.co.uk/industry/charitable-company-to-cio-conversion/

Source: Charity Commission and Companies House guidance, gov.uk

17/08/2026

Charities are leaving Gift Aid unclaimed, and the rules are shifting.

HMRC paid charities around £1.7 billion in Gift Aid in the year to April 2025, up 7%. Yet plenty of eligible donations still go unclaimed because declarations are missing, out of date, or never asked for.

A quick Gift Aid health check:

- Do you have a valid declaration for every eligible donor?
- Are you using the Gift Aid Small Donations Scheme for cash and contactless gifts?
- Are declarations stored so you can produce them if HMRC asks?
- Is someone actually claiming, on a regular schedule, not once a year?

One change to flag: HMRC is reviewing higher-rate relief on Gift Aid through the coding process, which affects some individual donors rather than your claim. Worth knowing if donors ask.

Gift Aid is one of the few places a charity can grow income without asking supporters for a penny more. Set up well in a system like Donorfy, claiming becomes routine rather than a once-a-year headache.

Want us to check what is being missed? Get in touch: enaidaccountancy.co.uk/contact

Source: HMRC UK charity tax relief statistics, gov.uk

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