A practical guide to UK charity due diligence for funders

Due diligence is where good intentions meet reality. You want to fund the work, but you also have a duty to know who you are funding. Done well, due diligence is quick and proportionate. Done badly, it is a folder of screenshots nobody can find later.

What to check, and why

For a UK organisation, a few checks cover most of the ground:

• Charity Commission register. Confirm the charity exists, is registered, is not in default on filings, and is not subject to a current regulatory concern. Check the registered name matches the applicant.
• Companies House. For charitable companies and CICs, confirm the company is active, the officers are as stated, and accounts are not overdue.
• Identity match. Make sure the charity number, company number and legal name all point at the same organisation. Mismatches are worth a second look.

The aim is not to build a dossier. It is to confirm the basics and flag anything that deserves a human's attention.

Proportionality matters

A two thousand pound community grant does not warrant the same scrutiny as a quarter-million programme grant. Build your process so the depth of checking scales with the size and risk of the award. Over-checking small grants wastes everyone's time and slows money to the front line.

The hard part: when registers cannot answer

Registers go down. APIs change. A charity may be too new to appear, or the data may simply be missing. The dangerous failure here is a system that fills the gap with a confident but false answer.

The right behaviour is honesty. When a register cannot be queried, the result should read "unavailable", clearly, and never present as a clean pass or a false finding. A human can then decide whether to wait, check manually, or proceed with a note. A finding you cannot trust is worse than no finding at all.

Keep the evidence with the application

Whatever you check, keep the result next to the application, not in a separate drive. When the panel reviews, the due diligence should be one glance away, and when you look back in a year, it should still be there. This is the quiet benefit of running checks inside your grant management system rather than across browser tabs: the evidence files itself.

Grantledger runs Charity Commission and Companies House checks as part of intake, degrades to "unavailable" rather than inventing findings, and stores the result against the application. If you are weighing built-in checks against bolt-on tools, our 2026 software guide covers what to look for.