The letter arrives in the spring. The grant was awarded last autumn for new goalposts, or a minibus contribution, or a summer project for the youth section. Now the funder wants a short report: what the money was spent on, how much came from elsewhere, and whether the work happened. You are the treasurer. The club secretary is looking at you. The bank statements are in one folder, the invoices are in a shoebox, and nobody has written down which payment belonged to which grant.
This is a common position for a volunteer treasurer of a sports club, PTA, Scout group, church hall or small registered charity. The fix is not a bigger spreadsheet. It is a habit of tagging each pound to its grant at the moment you record it.
The funder asks for a report six months after the award
Most funders ask for a report some months after the money lands. Some want it at six months, some at twelve, and some only when the grant is fully spent. The wording varies, but the questions rarely do. They want to know the amount received, what it was spent on, what else went into the project, and whether the outcome was delivered.
The difficulty is that six months is long enough for the detail to fade. The person who bought the materials has moved on. The receipt for the hire of the hall has gone into a coat pocket. The contribution from members was collected at training, not through the bank. By the time the report is due, you are reconstructing a project from memory and bank lines that say only "PAYMENT 4417".
Check the funder's own terms first. Some specify the report format, the deadline and what counts as an eligible cost. Some require you to keep the original invoices for a set period. Those rules sit above anything a bookkeeping tool does.
Tag income and spending to the grant at the point you record them
The useful habit is simple. When a grant payment arrives in the cash book, record it against the grant, not just as "income". When you pay a supplier for something the grant covers, record that payment against the same grant. When a member pays a contribution towards the project, record it there too.
This is the difference between a cash book that shows the club's money and one that shows where each project's money went. In Vasker, a restricted fund is the place to hold this. Each grant can be set up as its own fund, so the balance, the money in and the money out all sit together. You can see at a glance how much of the award is still unspent without opening a second file.
Tagging at entry matters for another reason. Once a payment is coded to a fund, it stays coded. You do not have to remember in March what the June payment was for. A year later, the next treasurer can open the fund and see the whole story in order.
If you are already using a spreadsheet, you can do the same thing with a column for "grant" and a rule that every row touching a grant gets a value in it. The discipline is the same either way. The tool only makes it harder to forget.
Match funding: showing your own contribution alongside the grant
Many grants ask for match funding. That means the club is expected to put in some of its own money or in-kind support alongside the award. Funders often want to see that the total project cost is covered, and that the club has its share.
So the report needs two columns that balance: what the grant paid and what the club added. The club's share might be cash from fundraising, a members' levy, a bank balance set aside, or volunteer hours valued at an agreed rate. Be careful with the last one. Check whether the funder accepts volunteer time as match, and at what rate, before you put it in a report.
Keep the club's contribution in its own fund or a clearly labelled sub-fund. If the bar night raised £400 towards the new kit, record it against the grant project so the match is visible. Do not net it off against general funds and hope the funder will not ask. They usually do, and the answer should take seconds rather than a weekend.
Where the grant covers only part of a project, keep the full project budget on one page. Show the total cost, the grant share and the club share. Then the report and the cash book tell the same story.
What a simple funder report contains
Most small-grant reports are shorter than treasurers expect. A typical version covers a handful of points:
- The grant reference, the amount awarded and the date received.
- A plain summary of what the money was spent on, in the order the project happened.
- A table of the main costs, each with the supplier, date and amount. Group small items if the funder allows it.
- The club's match contribution, with the source of each part.
- The outcome: what was delivered, how many people it reached, and anything that did not go to plan.
- Any money left over, and what the club proposes to do with it, if the terms allow.
- The name and role of the person signing the report.
If the cash book is tagged properly, most of this is a filter and a copy. The treasurer's job becomes checking the figures, adding a sentence or two about the outcome, and sending the report before the deadline.
Write the outcome section in the committee's words, not the funder's. The funder usually wants a sentence that a member would recognise. "The new kit was issued to all 42 players in May" is more useful than a paragraph about community engagement.
Keep the paperwork where the next treasurer will find it
Grant records outlive the person who ran the project. A funder may ask questions a year after the report is accepted, and the next treasurer will be the one answering them. Keep a folder for each grant, named with the grant reference and year. Put in the award letter, the signed terms, the report and the supporting receipts or scans.
The cash book should point to the folder. A note on the fund such as "award letter and final report in Grants 2025 / Pitch lighting" saves an evening of searching. Store scans rather than originals where you can, and check that the scans are readable. A receipt that has faded to grey in a damp hall cupboard is no use to anyone.
At handover, the grant folder is one of the first things to walk through. The new treasurer needs to know which grants are still open, what has been reported, and what the funder is still waiting for. Vasker's handover pack puts the fund list and balances in the same place as the rest of the year-end figures, so the new person does not start from a shoebox.
If your club also claims Gift Aid or other relief on donations, keep those records separate from grant files, with their own declarations. HMRC expects Gift Aid records to be kept for at least six years. For the current rules, check HMRC guidance directly. This is general information for treasurers, not tax advice.
Mechanism only, no invented funding figures
This article describes how grant tracking works, not what any club can expect to receive. Grant sizes, match rates, funder requirements and reporting deadlines vary widely between funders and change over time. Read the award terms for your own grant. If anything is unclear, ask the funder before you spend.
The mechanism is the part you can control. Tag each grant payment and each eligible cost to its fund as you record it. Keep the club's match visible. Keep the paperwork in one place. Then the six-month report is a matter of reading back your own records, not reconstructing them.
If you want to set this up, you can create your free account at Vasker and start a cash book with one fund at no cost. Grant matching, which lets you tie fund balances and match contributions to grant reporting, is on the Standard plan at £59 a year. Set up the first grant fund now, while you still remember what the award was for.