If you look after the finances or sit on the board of a Scottish charity, there's a change worth getting ahead of now — because it affects the very next set of accounts most charities will prepare, not some distant reform.

A new Charities SORP (the rulebook for how charity accounts are drawn up) takes effect for accounting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2026. It applies right across the UK, so Scottish charities reporting to OSCR are firmly in scope. If your financial year started in 2026, these are the rules your next accounts will be prepared under.

The headline change is a move to a tiered system based on income, designed to be more proportionate — lighter for smaller charities, fuller for the largest. Broadly: Tier 1 is income up to £500,000, Tier 2 sits between £500,000 and £15 million, and only Tier 3 (above £15 million) faces the fullest requirements, such as a mandatory cashflow statement. For most small and medium Scottish charities, that's a welcome reduction in burden.

A few other things to be aware of: there are new, clearer rules on how you account for income and for leases (with charity-specific examples to help), and the trustees' annual report gains dedicated space for impact reporting and environmental, social and governance matters — which is what funders increasingly want to see anyway.

Practical steps: work out which tier you fall into, have a word with your accountant or independent examiner before your year-end rather than after it, and use the lead time to get comfortable with the new report sections.

And a reminder that the wider changes under Scotland's 2023 charity law reforms — public trustee names and fully public accounts on the OSCR register — are now live, so it's a good moment to make sure your latest accounts and trustee details would bear public scrutiny.

Happy to talk any of this through below — I work across both the Scottish (OSCR) and the England & Wales systems. There are free plain-English governance guides at thecommitteeroom.co.uk.

Rachel Wall ACG — chartered governance professional