Help centre / Risks, policies & compliance / Pre-fill your Charity Commission annual return
Pre-fill your Charity Commission annual return
The Annual return page shows your deadline and copy-ready answers drawn from your live records: trustees, volunteers, policies and incidents. Copy each answer into the Commission's form on gov.uk, then record here that you've filed. Nothing is sent for you.
The annual return asks questions you've already answered through the year, such as who your trustees are and which policies you hold. This page pulls those answers together from your own records, so filing becomes copying rather than hunting. To be clear: you still file with the Charity Commission on gov.uk as usual. Nothing is sent from here.
Prepare and file
- Go to Governance, then Annual return.
- Check the deadline at the top. It's 10 months after your financial year end, or the Commission's own due date where the register shows one. If we don't know your year end, you'll be asked to set the month and day once.
- Read the Copy-ready answers. Each one shows the question, the answer from your records, and where it came from, for example "From your trustee register".
- Fix any gaps first. The page flags missing pieces, such as no adopted safeguarding policy or an empty risk register, and links you straight to the fix.
- Check the trustee cross-check. It compares your register with the Commission's public record and lists anyone who appears on one side only, so you can tidy both before filing.
- Sign in to the Commission's service on gov.uk and copy each answer across. Check anything the platform can't see from here, such as volunteers who don't have a login.
- Back on the Annual return page, choose Mark as filed and confirm with Yes, we filed it.
What happens next
Recording the filing closes the matching items in your compliance calendar and updates your filing history, so next year starts clean. Until then, any unfiled year on the Commission's register sits in the calendar with its due date, turning red if it slips past.
Common questions
Where do the answers come from? Only from your own records, and every answer says which register it came from. If there's no data behind a question, no answer is invented. Blank is honest.
The register still shows last year as not filed. Is that wrong? Probably not. The Commission's public register can lag a real filing by months. Once you've recorded the filing here, we trust your record.
The governance behind this: our free guide on charitycontrol.org explains the why in plain English.