New Charity Expenses Claim Documents

New Charity & Non-Profit template documents are available to assist charities to create expenses policies and to administer expenses claims. These comprise a form of expenses policy and a claim form designed to cover expenses which can be claimed by a trustee of a charity, a form of policy and a claim form which can be used by a charity volunteer, and also a form of policy and a claim form for use by any employee of a charity.

Charities should reimburse their paid staff for all expenses properly incurred by them in the course of their employee duties – they should not be out of pocket as a result of carrying out their duties. However, it is not usual practice for charities to reimburse employees with their costs of travelling between home and their usual place of work any more than it might be in the case of any other type of organisation.

In contrast to this, charities do and should generally reimburse charity trustees’ and volunteers’ expenses of travelling between home and their regular place of carrying out their duties for the charity. This should be very clearly covered in the charity’s written policy documents. Inclusion of those travel expenses should then ensure that trustees and volunteers do not incur any expense at all as a result of their trustee or volunteering roles.

A policy that includes those travel expenses serves as recognition of the fact that trustees and volunteers make their time available to the charity without any pay or other reward. For that reason most charities will consider that it is right and proper that such travel expenses should always be fully reimbursed. This is not the only reason for adopting such a travel expenses policy, however. Charities need to have trustees to run their organisations and in many cases they are also heavily reliant on volunteers, but they might find it more difficult to recruit and retain trustees and volunteers if they do not reimburse all such travel expenses properly incurred, especially at a time when the cost of living is rising significantly.

These new document templates should be useful to charities when either setting up a new charity or running an existing charity. These new documents comprehensively and clearly set out all of the types of expense that can be claimed, and how the individual in each case needs to complete and submit their claim.

The expenses policy and claim form templates for trustees can be found in Trustees – Guidance Notes and Documents, those for charity volunteers can be found in Charity Volunteer Agreements and those for charity employees can be found in Charity Governance, Administration, Policies and Procedures.