Help with information on setting up a Charity?

[Mummy2TandF]

I have registered a company name and now have a limited company, but want to atually run it as a charity. I have been told that you need to earn/make/raise £15,000 before you can actually register as a charity - is this right. If yes, what do I do in the meantie re:- declaring, tax returns etc? Also, any ideas on anything else I need to do in order to start up a charity? Any help grately appreciated, Thanks

Have a look at the Charity commission website which will tell you how to register and what the requirements are. I think that you only need to register with them once you earn over £5k per annum, but even if you don't register you would need to have a lot fothe governance and object documentation in place in order to satisfy the Inland Revenue.

Lots of helpful advice on ncvo website

Thanks for the links, does anybody know if I would be better to run it as a normal company and then give to charity rather than setting up my own charity? If that makes sense.

Depends what you will be doing. If you will be trading there are restrictions on what you can do, lots of charities who want to trade, sell t-shirts, badges or whatever, set up a separate trading subsidiary company to donate to the main charity iyswim.

All to do with tax and stuff, I am not an expert, the charity commission website has loads of stuff on it, it takes a bit of wading through though.

It depends on what you're trying to do. As fbb indicates there are quite a lot of restrictions in terms of what a charity is allowed to do, and there is a distinction between fund-raising and trading. You can't just run a company as a charity usually. Can you tell us a bit about what the company will be doing?

Ladymuck, I did post this in chat with my ideas but people advised me to have the thread deleted incase somebody stole my idea ..... I originally wanted to set up a website to help people in certain situations .. for example have links and info on any help financially, emotionally and practically that they might need, but I did also want to have relevant items available to purchase that would help them in their situations ... sorry this is a bit vague, but thinking about it I think the limited company will have to be run as a company with a statement saying that a percentage of every sale will be donated to charity.