Funding, delivery and reporting for community interest companies.

Why CIC funding is different from charity funding

Community interest companies file at Companies House, publish a CIC34 community interest report and often blend grant income with trading income. That mix makes it easy to lose track of which costs belong to a funded project and which belong to normal trading, especially when one bank account covers both.

Grant OS separates the two by tagging each payment to a specific grant and budget category, leaving untagged trading spend clearly outside your funded work. When a funder asks how their money was used, the answer comes from the tagged records rather than a reconstruction at year end.

Evidence of delivery, not just spend

Community funders want proof that sessions happened and people turned up. Each project records its lead, contributors and volunteers, along with start and end dates and a gallery for flyers, session photographs and attendance sheets.

That evidence sits next to the project's expenditure, so a monitoring return can show the cost of a programme and what it delivered in the same place.

Cashflow for teams without a finance officer

Small CICs usually run on staged grant payments, which makes timing the real risk. Grant OS charts your burn rate from imported bank data and estimates how long current funds last, so you can see a shortfall forming before it becomes an emergency.