There are two sets of questions. One set gets asked every time the board meets, because the answers move. The other attaches to fixed points in the year, because the calendar forces them.
Boards that only have the second set find out about problems in month nine, when the options have narrowed to the ones nobody wanted. The quarterly questions are what buy back the time.
If your board is not confident it is seeing the right things, governance support is where that gets sorted. What follows is the set of questions.
The six questions asked every quarter
How much cash is there, and how long does it last at current spending. This is the one question that cannot be deferred to the next meeting. A balance on its own answers half of it – the useful version is the balance expressed in weeks of operating cost.
Where are we against budget, and why. Variance without explanation is a number rather than information. A board told that fundraising income is thirty per cent below budget has learned nothing until someone says whether an event moved, a grant was refused, or the target was never realistic.
What does the year-end look like from here. Not what the budget said in March. What the forecast says now, with what is known today. This is the question that surfaces a slow deficit while there is still time to act on it.
How much of that cash can we spend. Restricted funds sitting in the same bank account as unrestricted ones make the balance look healthier than the position is. A charity can hold £60,000 and be able to spend £12,000 of it. If the pack does not split the two, the board is reading a number that means something other than what it appears to mean. This is also where financial controls and oversight meet, because the split has to exist in the records before it can appear in the report.
What proportion of income comes from the largest source, and what is behind it. Concentration creeps. No board decides to become dependent on one funder, and plenty of boards discover they have.
Is anything overdue. Filings, payroll obligations, HMRC, Gift Aid unclaimed. These are unglamorous, and they are the ones that turn into regulatory problems rather than financial ones.
The pack matters more than the meeting
Trustees cannot ask good questions of a document they first see when they sit down. The pack goes out a week ahead, and if it does not, the finance item is a presentation rather than scrutiny.
What is in it matters as much as when it arrives. Numbers with narrative on the variances, not numbers alone. A board reading a bank balance and nothing else is not exercising oversight; it is being reassured, and those look identical from the inside.
The most useful thing to ask a treasurer for is two sentences in writing each quarter: what changed since last time, and what they are watching. That takes ten minutes to write, and it is where the early warnings live.
The questions tied to fixed points in the year
Budget approval, before the year starts rather than three months into it. A budget approved in month four has already been operating unapproved for a quarter.
Accounts sign-off. The accounts are the trustees’ document, not the accountant’s. They are approved at a board meeting, usually signed by the chair or treasurer, and every trustee carries legal responsibility for them whether or not they personally signed. That is worth stating at the meeting, because a board that treats sign-off as a formality is approving something it has not read. Recording that the board considered them, and what it asked, is the same discipline that applies to any trustee decision that might be examined later.
Reserves review, tested against what the charity currently spends rather than against the figure written into the policy two years ago. If the reserves policy says three months and three months now costs forty per cent more than it did when the number was set, the policy is describing a different charity.
And the threshold check, which this year is not routine.
The threshold change landing on 1 October
The accounting thresholds in England and Wales change on 1 October 2026. Independent examination moves to £40,000. The ceiling for receipts and payments accounts moves to £500,000, as does the point at which an examiner has to be professionally qualified. Statutory audit moves to £1.5 million, with a separate asset test at £5 million of assets and £500,000 of income.
Until that point, the existing figures apply: £250,000 for accruals accounts, £1 million for audit, and £3.26 million of assets with £250,000 of income on the asset test.
Which set governs your charity depends on the accounting period, not on the date the board happens to be meeting. A charity with a March year-end and a charity with a December year-end are in different positions this autumn, and the difference decides what kind of examination the accounts need and who is allowed to carry it out.
The question to put to whoever prepares your accounts is simple and worth asking before the year closes rather than after: which set of thresholds applies to our current accounting period, and does it change what we need. Getting that answer in September is a conversation. Getting it in February is a problem.
If the board is not sure which figures apply to its own year-end, that is worth settling before the year closes rather than after. A short conversation usually sorts it. Book a call, and we can look at your band, your reporting pack, and what the board should be seeing each quarter.
What the board is looking for, not just at
The figures are the input. The patterns are the point, and every one of them is visible a quarter or two before it becomes urgent.
A deficit that runs four quarters before anyone names it. Restricted funding quietly covering core costs, which works until the grant ends and the costs do not. Debtors ageing, because a receipt that has not arrived is not income yet. One funder becoming most of the income without any decision having been taken. Cost recovery slipping, which is its own subject – why winning grants can leave a charity worse off covers how that happens.
None of these shows up in a bank balance. All of them show up in a forecast read alongside the previous three, which is the argument for keeping the same format quarter after quarter rather than redesigning the pack every year. Where a pattern turns into something the charity could not absorb, it belongs on the risk register rather than in the minutes of one meeting.
When quarterly is not often enough
Quarterly is a floor. Four situations move it.
Cash below three months of operating costs. A grant ending inside the year with nothing confirmed behind it. A significant new commitment – premises, a post, a partnership with financial obligations. And anything the last set of accounts or the examiner flagged, which should be tracked to closure rather than noted and forgotten.
In any of those, monthly for a period is proportionate, and stepping back down when the position settles is part of the same judgement.
What gets written down
Not the figures. The reasoning.
Minutes that record the board considered the forecast, what it concluded, and what it decided to do, are worth considerably more than minutes recording that the finance report was received. The first shows oversight. The second shows attendance, and after something goes wrong, that distinction is the whole argument.
The question to put to your board
Not whether the trustees see the numbers. Whether they would spot the thing that matters two quarters before it becomes urgent, and whether anything in the current pack would let them.
