Reporting to funders: progress reports and utilisation certificates

Reporting to a funder means telling it, regularly and honestly, what you did with its money, what changed as a result, and what went wrong. For a CSR funder it also means giving the company what it needs for its own legal duties: evidence that the money was used as its board approved, its year-end figures, details of any assets, and the data its CSR reports require.

This guide is for NGO programme and finance staff, and for the CSR teams who receive their reports. It covers what a company needs from you and why, the reports to send and when, utilisation certificates, reporting outcomes, photos and stories, reporting problems, and year-end and final reports.

What a CSR funder needs your reports for

Every report you send feeds a duty the company has under Section 135 of the Companies Act, 2013 or the CSR Rules:

Listed companies in India’s top 1,000 also publish a Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report, whose voluntary questions include CSR projects in aspirational districts and how many beneficiaries come from vulnerable and marginalised groups. If your funder answers them, it will ask you for those numbers.

So a good report isn’t a favour to a funder. It is part of how the funder stays within the law, and the clearer it is, the easier you are to fund again. For the company’s side, see monitoring CSR projects.

What to report, and when

Your agreement should fix the reports, their format and their dates. If it doesn’t, agree a rhythm like this:

A progress report needs no more than a few pages. A simple structure:

1. Summary: on track or not, in two sentences.
2. Milestones and activities against the plan.
3. Outputs and outcomes against the indicators, with the baseline and target for each.
4. Spending against the budget, with any big difference explained.
5. Problems and what you’re doing about them.
6. Safeguarding incidents, reported as the agreement requires.
7. The next period: the plan and the money it needs.

Utilisation certificates

A utilisation certificate (UC) is a statement of how a grant was spent against its approved budget over a period. It is signed by your authorised signatory and is usually certified by a chartered accountant, often your statutory auditor; your agreement will say what the company needs.

Keep the grant in a separate bank account or ledger, so every figure can be traced to vouchers and bank statements.

Reporting outcomes, not just activity

Funders want to know what changed, not only what you did. “48 sessions held” is an output; “girls reading a Class 3 text rose from 31% to 47%” is an outcome. Report both, against the indicators in your agreement:

• Give the baseline, the target and the method for each indicator, and say who collected the data.
• Break numbers down by gender, age, disability or social group where the agreement asks and where it doesn’t risk identifying anyone.
• Count each person once, and say how you counted.
• Say what you can and can’t attribute. Some change would have happened anyway; claim what your data supports.
• Use outside records where you can, such as school attendance registers or health centre data, which carry more weight than your own counts.

See choosing indicators and baselines and evaluation.

Photos and stories with consent

Stories and photographs make reports come alive, and funders often reuse them in their own reports and on their websites. Two rules protect the people in them:

• Consent first. Anyone who can be identified should understand where their story or photo will appear, agree to it, and be able to change their mind. For children, a parent or guardian consents. If the company may reuse the material, make sure the consent covers that use.
• Never identify children at risk. Indian law forbids identifying a child victim of a sexual offence (section 23 of the POCSO Act, 2012), and any child in need of care and protection, child in conflict with the law, or child victim or witness (section 74 of the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015). Blur children’s faces by default.

Don’t stage photographs, use captions that respect people’s dignity, and remove location data from image files before you share them. Never use an AI-generated image as if it showed your work. See consent, photos and dignity.

When things go wrong

Every project hits problems: floods close a centre, a key person leaves, a price doubles. Funders forgive problems; they rarely forgive surprises.

• Report early, before the next report is due, with what happened, what it affects and what you propose.
• Ask before you move money. Moving money between budget lines usually needs the funder’s written approval, and the company may need to record the change in its own plan.
• Report serious incidents at once. A safeguarding concern goes to the authorities as the law requires, and then to the funder within the time your agreement sets. A suspected fraud goes to the funder straight away.
• Don’t hide underspending. If you won’t use a tranche by 31 March, say so in February, so the company can plan its year-end.

Year-end and final reports

At the year-end, send the company your figures as at 31 March early in April: money received, spent and unspent, interest earned and assets bought. The company has until 30 April to move unspent money for ongoing projects into its Unspent CSR Account, so it needs your numbers in the first weeks of April. The MCA’s FAQs don’t say how money left with an agency at the year-end should be treated, so your agreement should say whether it carries forward, for an ongoing project, or is returned.

The final report closes the grant. Include:

• results against every target, and what you learned, including what didn’t work;
• total spending against budget, with a final utilisation certificate;
• the asset register and handover papers for anything passing to a gram panchayat, a school or a community group;
• what happens to any unspent money or interest, as the agreement says;
• what happens to participants’ personal data: kept, handed over or deleted, as agreed;
• how the work will continue, and a thank-you to the people who made it happen.

Keep your records for as long as the law and your agreement require; auditors and impact assessors may ask for them years later. See also accounts and audit for NGOs.