Your favourite charity has three numbers you should know
Rees Calder · 17 April 2026 · 6 min read
A charity’s annual report is a beautiful document. Photos of smiling children. A foreword from the chair. A "year in numbers" spread with impact infographics. Sixty pages, rendered in a serif font someone paid a design agency real money for.
It is also, largely, marketing.
Buried on page forty-something there is a different document. The Statement of Financial Activities. The balance sheet. The accounts. This is the document the charity has to file. It’s the one your donation actually shows up in.
Almost no donor ever reads it.
Which is fair. It’s long, it’s jargony, and every charity lays it out slightly differently. But three numbers from it, taken together, tell you more than the glossy PDF ever will. And one of them, on plenty of major UK charities right now, should give a donor pause.
The three numbers
1. Income. What came in this year. Donations, grants, shop takings, gift aid, the lot.
2. Spending. What went out. Programmes, staff, fundraising costs, governance, rent.
3. Trustees. How many people sit on the board.
That’s it. Three numbers. Every UK registered charity has them, filed publicly, updated annually, free to look up.
What income tells you
Income is easy. Big number, impressive. Small number, maybe not yet established.
Where it gets interesting: the same charity’s income this year versus two years ago. A big drop is either a planned wind-down or a fundraising crisis, and donors deserve to know which. A big rise is usually a one-off (emergency appeal, big gift) that won’t repeat. Either way, you want to compare.
Most annual reports show last year. The accounts file shows five. That’s the one you want.
What spending tells you
This is the number that matters most, and where the glossy PDF tends to cheat.
Total spending on its own is just a mirror of income: bigger charities spend more. The interesting question is the shape of it. Of every pound that went out, how many went on the mission, how many went on raising the next pound, how many went on governance?
The sector norm for governance (the board, legal, audit, compliance) is under 5%. Over 8% is a flag. Over 10% and you want to know why the admin tail is wagging the mission dog.
Fundraising efficiency is the other one. If a charity spent £40 to raise £100, that’s sector-acceptable on bad channels and terrible on good ones. If a charity spent £50 to raise £100 on unrestricted donations, over half of each donated pound paid for the ask, not the cause. Donors writing cheques assume it’s the other way around.
The accounts have this breakdown. The "impact report" does not.
The one that should worry you
Compare income and spending for the latest filed year. If spending is materially bigger than income, the charity is drawing down reserves.
Running a deficit once is normal. Grant-funded work is often delivered the year after it’s raised. A big project year can legitimately outspend its income.
Running a deficit repeatedly is a runway problem. A charity that’s been drawing down reserves for three years straight is either winding down on purpose (in which case say so) or in trouble (in which case also say so).
This is happening right now at plenty of high-street-name UK charities. British Heart Foundation spent £427m on £411m of income last filed year. Oxfam spent £363m on £339m. Some of this is planned; a lot of it is pressure. Either way, a donor who wrote "the cause" on the Direct Debit form should know.
Trustees are the governance smell test
Two trustees means the charity is one divorce away from a crisis. Twenty trustees means the board can’t decide anything. Seven to fifteen is the comfortable range.
The other trustee question: how long have they been there? A board where everyone has been there twelve years is a board that stopped questioning itself nine years ago. Most registers show trustee dates. Flick through.
What this isn’t
This is a financial hygiene check. It tells you whether the accounts add up, whether filings are on time, and whether the shape of the spend matches the story the charity tells.
It does not tell you whether a charity is effective. Effectiveness is a counterfactual: what would have happened without this intervention? That’s a different question, answered by a different tool, using outcomes rather than accounts. For global health: GiveWell. For climate: Founders Pledge. For anything in between: ask the charity for its evaluation methodology, and if it doesn’t have one, that’s itself a flag.
But plenty of charities with good intentions have bad accounts. A donor who can spot that is already ahead of 95% of donors, and has done it in under ten minutes.
Look up any charity in the UK
We built a tool for this. Type a name, get the three numbers, see which flags our rules raised. Data comes direct from the Charity Commission register, refreshed daily.
Bring a charity you already give to. The surprising ones are the household names.