Compliance, advice, board strategy and technology for Scottish charities.
Adviser-led support for trustees, senior staff and volunteers, from the policies you are missing to the questions your board is actually facing.
Behind it is our own Charity Compliance Engine, built so that every answer is calibrated to your charity and grounded in Scots law rather than general advice.
The compliance burden is real, and keeping on top of it is a job in itself.
Scottish charities face a growing weight of regulatory obligation: OSCR reporting, trustee duties under the 2005 Act, data protection, safeguarding, employment law, Gift Aid, health and safety. It does not all come from OSCR. The Information Commissioner, HMRC, Disclosure Scotland and the Health and Safety Executive each reach charities directly, and the obligations sit across dozens of separate Acts and regulations. The guidance exists, but it is written for someone who already knows the framework, and it is rarely calibrated to a charity of your size and activities.
Most small and medium charities have no dedicated compliance resource. Trustees carry the responsibility personally. Getting it wrong carries real consequences, for the charity and for individuals.
Generic templates and tick-box checklists do not solve this. Proportionate, specific guidance does.
What we do
Four ways we work with charities
Most boards start with the compliance foundation, because that is where the gaps usually are. From there, take whatever you need.
Compliance foundation
The policies that apply to you, drafted with your board. How the foundation works
Ongoing advice
Governance, conflicts, risk, people and money, as questions arise, from an adviser who already knows you.
Board strategy sessions
Facilitated sessions and awaydays, grounded in Scottish charity law.
Technology and AI
Microsoft 365 for nonprofits and the right AI, set up successfully with you.
The engine behind it
What the engine adds
An adviser does the judging. The Charity Compliance Engine does the groundwork, and it is not a general-purpose AI tool given a compliance prompt. It is a purpose-built system, developed through direct experience of working with Scottish charities as a trustee and adviser, and it is what makes the advice consistent from one charity to the next.
Grounded in Scottish law and regulation
Every response operates within a defined framework of more than 70 Acts and regulations of Scottish and UK law. Anything citing an instrument outside that list is flagged for the adviser before handover.
Calibrated to your charity, not a generic charity
Before any guidance is generated, the engine builds a detailed profile of your charity: your income, activities, the people you work with, your governance structure. The guidance that follows reflects your actual circumstances, not a one-size-fits-all template.
Built on a curated knowledge base, not the open internet
The engine draws on a curated knowledge base built from Scottish regulatory guidance, real governance experience, and knowledge developed through direct work with Scottish charities. It does not search the web or generate answers from general training data.
Adviser-led by design
Every session in the pilot was adviser-led, and that remains the model. The pilot was a deliberate choice: it validated the engine against real charities, refined the guidance and established that the outputs were genuinely useful before any wider rollout. The charities that took part were never test subjects. Their feedback shaped what the engine has become, and they had direct access to the people building it.
Outputs
What the compliance foundation produces
A structured conversation with your trustees, staff and volunteers. Six areas frame it, and you work through the ones that reach your charity, which is rarely all of them. At the end your board holds its documents and board plan, one file that shows every document it agreed and places each one into its meetings, with a plain-English review, a guidance pack to keep, the policies that were missing as editable Word files, and a record of the whole session.
A first session usually runs to around two hours, because defining your charity properly is what makes everything after it specific. Most charities then continue over more than one sitting. No preparation is required beyond a working knowledge of what your charity does.
Beyond the session
Your charity does not sit still. Neither does this.
You take on staff, win new funding, start a new service, change structure. A funder asks for a policy you have never heard of. When that happens, the question is rarely generic. It involves your trustees, your funding and your circumstances, and a general answer is no answer at all.
You are not starting again with a stranger. You are coming back to an adviser that already knows your charity, the plan your board agreed and the reasoning behind it.
The pilot has concluded. The work continues.
The Charity Compliance Engine has completed its pilot with Scottish charities. Free pilot sessions are no longer being offered, and what the pilot produced is set out across this site, in the charities’ own words.
If your charity is navigating compliance pressure and would benefit from a structured, expert-guided review, we would like to hear from you.