You've just registered as a charity. What happens now?

Registration is the part everyone concentrates on, and then it goes through and the emails stop and it is oddly quiet. Nobody sends you a manual. This is the year that follows: what to do before your first proper board meeting, what you are now obliged to do, and what can safely wait.

Before your first board meeting

Your first meeting as a registered charity sets the pattern for every one after it, so it is worth ten minutes of preparation more than it looks like it needs.

Have an agenda circulated in advance rather than assembled in the room, and put declarations of interest at the top as a standing item so declaring becomes routine rather than awkward. Agree who takes the minutes, and agree that someone always does, because the most common failure in a new charity is not bad minutes but missing ones. Confirm your quorum from your governing document, so you know when you can and cannot make decisions.

Then read your governing document out loud between you once, properly, at that first meeting. It is dull, it takes twenty minutes, and almost no board ever does it. The ones that do spend the next five years knowing what their own rules say.

The records you must now keep

Two things stop being optional the moment you register.

Minutes of your meetings, recording decisions, who was present, and any interests declared. These are the legal record of what the board decided and why, the evidence you reach for if a decision is ever questioned by a funder, a regulator or a member. They are not a transcript and they do not need to be long. Our free minutes template gives you a Commission-friendly layout with decision and action logs built in.

Financial records adequate to show and explain the charity's transactions. In practice, for a small new charity, that means a simple record of money in and money out, receipts kept, and a bank account in the charity's name that nobody's personal money goes near.

The four policies that actually matter in year one

New charities are often handed a pack of twenty policies and end up adopting none of them. Start with the handful that manage your real risks.

Safeguarding, which is non-negotiable if you work with children or adults at risk and the one the Commission takes most seriously. Financial controls: who can spend what, how payments are authorised, how cash is handled, with the golden rule that no single person controls a transaction from start to finish. Conflicts of interest: a register of interests and a routine for declaring, which protects your trustees as much as the charity. Data protection: you are handling people's information from day one, so you need to know what you hold and why.

All four are available free on our resources page, as templates to adapt rather than adopt unread. A short policy your board follows beats a long one nobody has opened.

Your first deadlines

Your financial year end is set when you register, and everything else counts from it. Two things follow.

Your accounts, prepared on a basis appropriate to your size and structure — small unincorporated charities can usually use simple receipts-and-payments accounts rather than full accruals. Your annual return to the Charity Commission, which is due within ten months of your financial year end. What you have to file, and what scrutiny your accounts need, depends on your income: our guide to the annual return, step by step sets out the thresholds and what changes at each one, and several of those thresholds changed on 30 September 2026.

If you registered as a charitable company, you have a second set of obligations at Companies House, accounts and a confirmation statement on their own timetable, and your trustees as directors are within the identity verification rules.

The practical move is to put every date in one place now, while there is nothing due. Our deadline checker works them out from your year end in about thirty seconds.

Things people forget in the first year

HMRC recognition. Registering with the Charity Commission does not register you for charitable tax reliefs. That is a separate application to HMRC, and it is what lets you claim Gift Aid. Charities routinely discover this a year late and lose a year of Gift Aid they were entitled to.

Keeping the register up to date. Trustee changes, address changes and contact changes need reporting to the Commission, not saving up for the annual return.

Insurance. Public liability if you run activities or premises, employers' liability if you take on staff, and trustee indemnity if your board wants it. Worth a conversation before your first event rather than after.

Your registered address is public. On a small new charity this is very often the chair's or the treasurer's home, published on the register for anyone to look up. It is free to change to a different address, and worth doing deliberately rather than by accident: see our guide on keeping a trustee's name off the public register.

What can wait

Plenty. A reserves policy matters once you have reserves. A volunteer policy matters once you have volunteers. A full risk register, a three-year strategy, an equality and diversity policy and a fundraising policy are all genuinely useful, and all things a funder may eventually ask for, but a first-year board that tries to write them all will do everything badly and lose two of its trustees to exhaustion.

Do the four policies, keep decent minutes, hit your first deadlines. That is a successful first year, and it is more than most.

Frequently asked questions

This guide is general information for trustees and committee members, not legal or financial advice, and every charity is different. Rules can change, so always confirm the current position with the relevant regulator or a suitably qualified adviser before acting. Last reviewed October 2026.