What documents do funders ask for with an application?

England and Wales: This page sets out the position in full — what goes in the pack, which policies are a funder’s condition rather than the law’s, and the filing deadline a funder can see you against. Scotland: the same pack, with one difference that matters here — the deadline for getting accounts to OSCR is shorter, and there is a section below. Northern Ireland: the same pack, and the same filing deadline as England and Wales, under the Charities Act (Northern Ireland) 2008 rather than the Charities Act 2011.

Where the list of supporting documents comes from

The document list is not a fixed list. It is generated from two things the funder has already published: its eligibility rules, and the terms it attaches to the grant. Whoever assembles the pack, usually the secretary or the treasurer, works from those two.

Much of the pack already exists. If you built a reusable funder research profile of your charity, most of it is copies of what the profile points to. The budget from when you built the project budget and the plan from when you wrote the monitoring and evaluation section travel with it.

Work in that order and the pack assembles itself. Take each eligibility rule and ask what document proves it.

The National Lottery’s small grants programme, Awards for All, requires a board of at least 2 unrelated members. So the pack needs a trustee list. The names on it have to match your register entry at the Charity Commission, OSCR or CCNI. An assessor can look that up in a minute.

Then take the grant conditions and ask the same question. A condition that you hold a particular policy means the pack needs that policy, adopted and dated, not a draft.

What you end up with is shorter than a generic checklist and much harder to argue with. Every item on it answers something the funder asked.

What nearly every funder asks for

Supporting documents are the attachments that prove what the application form claims. Five things recur across almost every application form. Assemble these once and keep them somewhere the whole team can find them.

• The governing document — the current version, including any amendments, not the one adopted at the founding meeting if it has since changed.
• The most recent filed accounts and trustees’ annual report — as filed, not as drafted. This is where packs fail, as the section on accounts explains.
• A trustee list — names and roles, matching what the register shows.
• Bank details — usually a recent statement or a paying-in slip, and sometimes evidence of the bank mandate showing who can authorise payments. The mandate is set when you establish authorisation limits and update the bank mandate.
• Policies — which ones depends entirely on the funder and the project. That is the next section.

Two habits save a surprising amount of time. Keep the pack as a set of dated files rather than a folder of “latest” versions, and record where each one came from. When the same funder asks again next year, you need to know whether the file is still current.

Policies: a funder’s condition, not usually the law’s

A funder’s list of required policies is its own condition, not usually the law’s. This is the distinction the whole of this hub turns on, and a policy list is where it is easiest to lose.

Almost none of these policies is required by any statute. What makes them compulsory for you is the grant agreement you are about to sign. That is contract, not law — and it means the answer to “do we have to have one?” is different for every funder.

The National Lottery Community Fund’s own standard terms are the clearest published example:

• Whistleblowing. For grants over £20,000, the fund requires a written policy, publicised internally. Staff must be trained on it, and the policy reviewed at least every 2 years. No statute requires a charity to have one at all.
• Safeguarding. The fund requires an appropriate written policy where the project works with children or adults at risk. Again, no provision requires the document itself. The underlying duties are fiduciary and statutory, and the Charity Commission expects trustees to have suitable policies in place.
• Internal financial controls. A funder condition rather than a policy duty, and a specific one: that no single individual has sole responsibility for any single transaction.

The fund’s own page adds a caution worth repeating, verbatim: “These terms and conditions are only an example of ones we use. If you’re awarded funding, your specific programme’s terms and conditions may differ from these.” Read the terms for the programme you are applying to.

Which policies your charity needs, as opposed to which a funder asks for, is settled elsewhere in this guide. Adopt a whistleblowing policy and Adopt a volunteer policy both work through the legal position properly. Do not adopt a policy for a bid alone. A policy nobody follows is worse evidence than not having one.

Accounts: the supporting document that fails most often

The single sourced mistake on this step is submitting out-of-date accounts. It happens for an innocent reason: the most recent set has not been finalised yet.

Attach the most recent set you have filed. If your year end was last month and nothing is signed off, the previous year’s filed accounts are the right answer. They are not a weakness.

What is a weakness is the gap a funder can see without asking you. Your filing record is public, and the deadline is a legal one:

You must file within that period. A charity that misses it in England and Wales meets an escalation that is published and well documented:

1. Reminders; the register entry shows the documents as outstanding
2. A final written warning with a compliance deadline, at the pre-inquiry stage
3. Inclusion in the double defaulter statutory class inquiry under s.46, for charities in default for two or more of the last five years

Most of that is invisible to a funder. The first line is not. An assessor who looks you up sees the documents marked outstanding on your own register entry. That lands next to the question they are already asking: whether you can manage a grant.

Filing itself is covered when you file your accounts.

What the funder does with the pack

Two of the eleven largest UK funders publish anything about why applications fail. BBC Children in Need is one of them, and its list starts where this page does.

The reason it names first is not meeting the Minimum Standards for Grantmaking — safeguarding, governance, finance — the most common reason an application is not even assessed. Further down the same list sits organisational capacity, financial viability, or unsecured match funding.

Read that carefully. The screen the pack fails is not the assessment. It comes before the assessment. A project that would have been funded can be refused on the strength of a document set that did not stand up. That is the whole argument for spending half a day on this step rather than twenty minutes.

The final check against the funder’s list

Finish by going back to the funder’s page and reading its list of required attachments as if you had never seen the form.

Tick each item off against what you hold. Where the funder asks for something you do not have, decide now whether it can be produced honestly in the time available. If it cannot, that tells you something about whether to apply at all. It is not a problem to solve at midnight.

Then date the pack. Record what each file is, when it was produced, and when it will need replacing. Most of what you have just assembled is reusable for a year; the accounts are reusable until the next set is filed.

With the pack dated and checked against the funder’s list, the next step is to edit to the word limit and submit.

Common mistake: submitting out-of-date accounts

It happens because the most recent set has not been finalised. The consequence is not a polite request for a newer copy.

BBC Children in Need names financial viability and governance among its published reasons for not assessing an application at all. So the pack can end the application before anyone reads the project. Attach the most recent filed set, and make sure the trustees named on it match the register.

Worked example

Tollgate Youth CIO applies in February. Its financial year ended the previous March, and those accounts were filed in January — late, but filed.

That is fine. They are the most recent filed set, and that is what the funder asked for.

Two things make them fine rather than awkward. The board composition shown on the register matches the trustee list in the application, so nothing an assessor checks contradicts anything they were sent. And the covering note says in one line that the accounts were filed in January. The funder learns it from Tollgate rather than from the register.

What would not be fine is attaching the current year’s draft figures because they look healthier. A draft is not a filed document, and the mismatch with the register is the first thing an assessor sees.