Understanding Receipts & Payments
The simplest form of accounting for small charities
Introduction
Receipts and Payments accounts (sometimes called ‘cash-based accounts’), are the simpler format available as an option to smaller unincorporated charities. You might want to check out the Charity Commission’s own template and guidance CC16.
Below we have a video to talk you through each part of the accounts, and you can download the example we discuss to look at for yourself.
Accounts for all charities are publicly available on the Charity Commission. You may find it helpful to look at similar charities to yours and see how they present their accounts and what they include in their trustees annual report.
Download
Click the button below to download the Rainbow Parents Carers Forum year end December 2024 accounts as an example. (Size: 1.11MB, Format: PDF)
Demo video
In the video below, we explain each part of a set of Receipts and Payments accounts and why they are important.
Download transcript (Size: 25KB, Format: Microsoft Word)
Further support
If you need any help with our resources, feel free to contact us. We are happy to explain them and offer training. We can even redesign the tools a bit, perhaps expand them or develop new features, because these resources are fairly basic tools and they're not designed for everyone.
You may need to amend the tools yourself a little bit to suit your individual needs as an organisation, and we would encourage you to adapt them and make the resources work for you.
We hope you enjoy them and find them useful. Providing free advice and resources helps us achieve our own charitable goal, which is to help organisations run themselves more efficiently and effectively.
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