Guide for PTA treasurers

What is a CC16a, and how do you fill one in?

If you have just taken over a PTA’s accounts, CC16a is probably the first piece of jargon anybody has handed you without explaining. This page sets out what the form is, what goes on each line, and when it is due.

What a CC16a actually is

CC16a is the Charity Commission’s receipts and payments accounts template. Receipts and payments is the simpler of the two ways a charity can present its accounts: you record money when it actually moves, rather than when it was earned or owed.

It is only available below £250,000 of gross income. If your PTA is somehow over that, you need accruals accounts, an accountant, and probably a lie-down.

The practical consequence is the one that catches people out. A summer fair held in June whose cash is banked in September is a September receipt. An invoice you raised in March but were paid for in May is a May receipt. The date the money moved is the date that counts. Where that straddles a year end the accounts can read strangely: the prizes and the printing for the fair fall in one year and the takings in the next, so one year shows a cost with nothing to show for it and the next shows income out of nowhere. Neither year, on its own, tells you what the fair did.

Nothing can be moved between years to tidy that up — the cash basis is the cash basis. What Treasurer’s Ledger does instead is list those items in a note headed “Relates to other financial years”, under the accounts, so the committee can see why a year reads the way it does.

Section A1: receipts

Income is sorted into a small number of named lines. These are the ones a PTA usually needs — the form allows for others, so yours may carry a line that is not here:

• —Donations, legacies and grants
• —Fundraising activities
• —Interest on deposit account
• —Hire of equipment
• —Advertising
• —Investment income
• —Other income

The two that do most of the work in a PTA are donations, legacies and grants and fundraising activities. A school disco, a raffle and a Christmas fair are fundraising. A parent handing you £20, a supermarket community grant and money from a local trust are donations and grants.

Section A3: payments

Money going out is sorted the same way. Again, these are the lines a PTA usually needs rather than the whole set:

• —Cost of fundraising events
• —Insurance
• —Charitable activities
• —Other

The distinction people find hardest is between cost of fundraising activities and charitable activities and grants. Prizes, venue hire and printing for the summer fair are the cost of raising the money. Buying the school a set of reading books is the charitable activity you raised it for. The same £300 is on a different line depending on which it was.

Restricted funds

If somebody gave you money for a stated purpose — a grant for playground equipment, a collection for a specific trip — that money is restricted, and it has to be reported separately from your general funds. It is not yours to spend on something else, even temporarily, and the form has a column for it.

This is the single most common thing to get wrong, because the money sits in the same bank account as everything else. The split is a matter of what the giver was told, not where the cash is.

Which is also how to avoid the problem before it starts. If you are fundraising for a particular thing — a minibus, a playground, a trip — say when you ask, on the poster and on the form, that any money raised beyond what is needed will be applied in line with the PTA’s general charitable purposes. Then a surplus is yours to use freely in line with your purposes. Without that sentence, whatever is left over stays restricted to a purpose that has already been met, and you can be left holding cash you cannot spend on anything with no straightforward way to release it.

When it is due

The deadline runs from your financial year end, and it differs by nation:

• England and Wales: 10 months after your financial year end
• Scotland: 9 months after your financial year end
• Northern Ireland: 10 months after your financial year end

In England and Wales a registered charity must file an annual return if its gross income is £10,000 or more, and every CIO files whatever its income. In Scotland and Northern Ireland every registered charity files, with no income threshold. Whether any of that applies to your PTA depends on how it is constituted and whether it is registered, which is worth checking rather than assuming.

Independent examination

In England and Wales, accounts must be independently examined once gross income is above £25,000. That is income, not what you made. Gross income is everything that came in — donations, grants and the full takings from every event before the prizes, the venue and the printing come off them. A PTA that took £30,000 across the year and was left with £8,000 has an income of £30,000 and is over the line. It is the same figure the annual-return threshold above uses. An independent examiner is not an auditor and does not have to be a qualified accountant, but they do have to be independent of the committee, which in practice rules out anyone who has been signing off the spending.

How Treasurer’s Ledger does this part

Every line above is a line the software already keeps for you. You answer plain questions as the year goes along — what an expense was for, which event a card payment belongs to, whether a grant was restricted — and the CC16a figures come out of that, with the restricted column filled in and the arithmetic checked.

This page is general information about the form, not advice about your charity. The Charity Commission publishes the CC16a template and its own guidance notes, and your independent examiner is the right person to ask about your particular accounts.