The Charities SORP 2026 has been in force since 1 January 2026, and applies to accounting periods starting on or after that date. That means most charities are now most of the way through their first year under it, while nobody has yet closed a set of accounts to the new rules. A December year-end charity will do that in a few weeks; a March year-end charity next spring. The rules apply to charities that prepare accruals accounts. For accounting years ending on or after 30 September 2026, a non-company charity in England and Wales with income below £500,000 can prepare receipts and payments accounts instead, and those sit outside the SORP; charitable companies prepare accruals accounts whatever their income (Charity Commission guidance).
That timing matters. Over the past year the work has been preparation: reading the new rules and deciding what they mean for your charity. That stage is over. The work now is reporting under them for the first time, and this is where the practical effect shows, because the first year-end under SORP 2026 asks for more evidence behind the filing than the old SORP did.
That work lands hardest on the sole finance lead. In a charity where one person prepares the numbers, a bigger statutory ask doesn't get spread across a team. It gets added to an already full plate, usually on top of the day job.
What changed in January
There are three main changes that will affect your first year-end under SORP 2026.
1. Reporting now scales with income. Tier 1 is income up to £500,000, Tier 2 is £500,000 to £15 million and Tier 3 is over £15 million. Each tier adds disclosures to the one below, and only Tier 3 has to produce a cash flow statement under the SORP, so most charities reading this have one statement fewer to prepare (Charities SORP 2026 summary of changes). One exception: a charitable company that is too large to count as a small company still needs a cash flow statement under company law. If you haven't confirmed your tier yet, that's your first job.
2. Income earned in exchange for something, such as contracts, fees for services and trading, is recognised through a five-step model. Income you used to book on receipt may now be recognised later, or in stages, depending on the conditions attached to it. Donations and legacies are not exchange transactions and are unaffected. Grants need checking one by one, because a grant with performance conditions attached can count as an exchange transaction.
3. Most leases are now on the balance sheet. Leases under twelve months and leases of low-value assets stay off, so the photocopier is fine; the office and the minibus are on. A peppercorn lease, where the charity pays a nominal rent, is treated differently again: the SORP's lease module says it is unlikely to meet the definition of a lease, and the asset is recognised instead as a donated right-of-use asset at fair value (Hazlewoods on SORP 2026 leases).
What it means for a thin finance team
SORP 2026 changes how much you have to evidence and reconcile in order to report what the charity does. Getting income recognition right for your contract income, supporting the lease figures, and producing the disclosures your tier requires all rest on the same foundation: clean, well-coded transaction data that ties back to source.
If your records for the year so far are scattered across spreadsheets, receipts and an inbox, most of the extra effort will go on assembling and checking that data before the reporting can start.
Where Moss fits
Moss helps charities produce clean, coded spend data, which is what your accountant or accounting team needs when the time comes to prepare the SORP filing. Expense management and accounts payable capture and code spend as it happens, with receipts attached, and sync with or export to your accounting system, so the transactions feeding your year-end arrive coded and audit-ready rather than needing to be reconstructed. The filing itself stays with your accountant and your accounting system.
Where to put your effort
If you're a sole finance lead at a charity, you should aim to separate the SORP report from the data underneath it. The report is a deliverable you'll produce with your accountant, against the new rules. The data is yours, all year, and it's where the real workload sits.
Four things are worth doing before your first year-end under the new SORP. Confirm which tier your income puts you in and read what it asks for. List every lease the charity holds and note which run longer than twelve months. List the contracts, service agreements and grants that count as exchange income, because those are the ones the five-step model applies to. And code the spend you have already made this year, then keep coding it as it happens, so the data is reconciled before the year-end rather than reconstructed at it. The more of that is done before the deadline, the less the first SORP 2026 year-end costs you.
