Why your accounts and your impact belong together.
Compliance keeps you registered. Impact proves your worth. Treating them as two separate jobs costs you money, trustee time, and the joined-up evidence your funders increasingly expect.
Here’s the case for producing them together, and what that looks like in practice.
The problem
Charities carry a double burden — and pay for it twice.
Every year you answer to two audiences who want different things, on different timelines, in different formats.
The Charity Commission wants compliance
Accounts to SORP FRS 102 and, over £25,000 income, an independent examination. Get it wrong and you risk your registration and your trustees’ standing. It’s essential — but it doesn’t bring in a penny of new income.
Funders want evidence of impact
Grant-makers increasingly expect measured outcomes — not just what you spent, but the difference it made. Without credible impact evidence, strong applications get turned down in favour of charities that can prove their worth.
Most charities meet these two demands with two providers — an accountant and, if they can afford it, a separate impact consultant. Two engagements, two invoices, two demands on trustee time, and two reports that never quite talk to each other.
The difference
One engagement, where the money proves the mission.
When the same practice produces your accounts and your impact assessment, the financial data and the outcomes reinforce each other — and you get something neither an accountant nor an impact consultant can give you alone.
Impact grounded in real spend
We evidence outcomes against your actual programme costs — “£X invested here produced this measured social value.” Funders trust numbers that reconcile to your accounts.
A stronger funding case
Hand a funder an integrated finance-and-impact report and you answer the money question and the difference question in one document — the evidence strong applications are built on.
Less cost, less duplication
One provider, one set of records, one timetable. No paying twice to explain the same year, and far less demand on your trustees and staff.
A framework funders recognise
Our AIAF impact framework is aligned to the Social Value Act and the UN Sustainable Development Goals — the language grant-makers and commissioners already use.
Trustee accountability, built in
Your board gets a clear view of both financial health and mission delivery — the two things they’re accountable for — in one place.
Ready for public reporting
Everything is prepared to a professional standard you can publish in your annual report, on your website, or in a stakeholder update.
The shift
From a grudge purchase to a strategic asset
- —A cost you have to bear each year
- —Proves what you spent — nothing more
- —Sits in a drawer after filing
- —Says nothing to a funder about your value
- ✓An investment that evidences your difference
- ✓Proves what you spent and what it achieved
- ✓Goes straight into your next bid or report
- ✓Shows funders the difference you make
What you receive
Your integrated deliverable
SORP FRS 102 accounts
Receipts and payments or accruals, prepared and trustee-approved.
Signed examiner’s report
Statutory independent examination under s.145, ready for the Charity Commission.
AIAF impact assessment
Outcomes measured against your finances, mapped to Social Value and the UN SDGs.
Funder-ready summary
A clear, publishable narrative that joins your finances and your impact into one story.
Take the full integrated service or just the parts you need — many charities start with accounts and examination, then add impact assessment as funding demands grow.
Get started
See what an integrated engagement would cost you
Tell us your charity’s income level and year end, and we’ll send a fixed-fee quote for accounts, examination and impact assessment — within one working day.