🏷 Funds & the trustees' report

A club that takes a £15,000 grant to relay the green has taken money it is not free to spend on anything else. If the accounts show one pot, the trustees are signing something untrue.

Four kinds of fund

• General — the club’s own money, to spend as the committee decides. Every club has exactly one and it cannot be deleted.
• Designated — the club’s own money the committee has set aside for something (the green replacement fund). A designation is a decision, and the committee can undo it.
• Restricted — somebody else’s condition attached to their money. Record the funder’s wording as they gave it, because that wording is what the club is bound by.
• Endowment — capital to be held rather than spent.

Every existing ledger entry was put into the general fund when funds were switched on. Nothing changed meaning; a row belonging to no fund would show in the ledger and in no fund total, and that is a discrepancy nobody can find from the other end.

Overspending a restricted fund

Warned about, plainly, because it is the error that actually happens. The fix is a transfer from general funds, which is a committee decision and is recorded as one — it is not a ledger entry, because no money entered or left the club. Restricted money cannot be transferred out to general funds; that direction is refused.

The trustees’ annual report

The statement of financial activities split restricted / unrestricted / total, the balance sheet, and the narrative sections a small charity report needs — objects and activities, achievements, financial review, reserves policy, trustees and officers. What Pavilion knows it fills in; the rest are text boxes, saved so next year starts from last year’s wording rather than a blank page.

Reserves

Free reserves — unrestricted funds less anything designated — expressed in months of running costs, against the target the club has set. It is the single most-asked-for number in a small charity’s report and the one most clubs cannot produce.

This is a pack to hand to your independent examiner, not a filing. Pavilion does not claim compliance with SORP and does not produce an official form. Thresholds for examination and audit change; check the Charity Commission’s current guidance rather than anything printed here.

Common questions

We are a CASC, not a charity. Is this any use?

The fund split still is — a grant with conditions on it binds a CASC exactly as it binds a charity, and a funder will ask how their money was spent. The trustees’ report sections are written for a charity; use the ones that fit.

Our balance sheet does not balance.

The general fund is the balancing figure against net assets, and any difference is shown plainly rather than smoothed away — the same treatment the accumulated fund gets. A difference usually means an opening balance that was never set. If the club keeps its books on a cash basis there is no true balance sheet to produce, and the report says so rather than inventing one.