How we write this guide

This guide is researched and drafted with AI assistance against primary sources, checked by an automated set of publication gates, and reviewed on a schedule set by how fast each topic changes. Named practitioner review is planned, not yet in place — see below. This page explains the whole process, including the parts we haven’t built yet.

Who writes and reviews it

Ivan Siyanko (CharityIQ) is the editor responsible for this guide. Pages are drafted from structured research records — one record per fact, one per step in a task — rather than written freehand by a single author per page, so that a threshold or a deadline lives in one place and every page that mentions it points back to the same record. We are building a programme of named volunteer practitioner reviewers — a charity solicitor, an independent examiner, a safeguarding lead, and a reviewer each for Scotland and Northern Ireland — and pages they have signed off will carry a “Reviewed by” badge naming them and the date. That programme has not started yet. No page on this site currently carries a practitioner sign-off, and we will not say otherwise until one does.

The role of AI, and the human check that follows it

Research for this guide is produced with AI assistance, checked against primary sources — legislation.gov.uk, the Charity Commission, OSCR, CCNI, HMRC and the Charities SORP — not against other websites’ summaries of them. Every figure you see on a page is a referenced fact, not typed prose: it carries a source, a confidence rating and a review-due date, and it is inserted into the page at render time rather than written by hand, so that a rate rising or a threshold moving is a one-place fix rather than a page-by-page hunt.

Before a page can publish, it has to pass a set of automated checks we call gates. In plain words, a sample of what they enforce: every number needs a primary source, or an explicit note saying why one isn’t available yet; a fact about England and Wales must also record the Scotland and Northern Ireland position, even where that position is “not researched”; a fact whose own notes admit that something “could not be established” is not allowed to also be marked high confidence; a figure written into a page as plain text, rather than as a referenced figure, fails the check and the page does not go live; and a page cannot publish pointing at a source, a prerequisite step or a fact record that doesn’t exist. Where a topic could not be researched to a standard we’d stand behind, the honest result is a page marked not ready, not a confident page that happens to be thin.

How often we check it’s still right

Every page carries a volatility rating, and the rating — not how important the topic feels — decides how often we look at it again. Pages about thresholds, the SORP and the annual return change often and are reviewed quarterly. Most procedural and operational pages are reviewed every six months. Conceptual pages that change rarely, such as what a theory of change is, are reviewed annually. The date a page was last checked, and the date it’s next due, are both shown on the page itself.

When we get it wrong

We say so, on the page and in a dated, public log at /corrections/: what was wrong, why, how we found it, and what we changed. We would rather show one honest correction than a clean-looking page with none.

How this guide is funded

This guide is free to read and does not require an account. It is written and maintained by CharityIQ, a product that helps with some of the tasks the guide explains — grant writing and compliance among them. Where a page connects to that product, the guide answers the question in full first, with a method that works whether or not you ever pay for anything, and the product appears afterwards as a single, clearly labelled link: this is the manual method; here is the faster one. A guide that held back the real answer to sell the tool would not be worth reading, and we know it.

What this is not

This guide gives information about how UK charity law and regulation work. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and it does not replace a solicitor, accountant, auditor or independent examiner where a page itself says one is needed.