Spending and managing your National Lottery Awards for All funding

We’re delighted you’re using a National Lottery grant to improve the lives of your local community. Our Awards for All programme is light touch and designed to get money out the door quickly, but it’s still important to keep clear records that demonstrate how you spent your funding.

As National Lottery funding is public money, your funding comes with terms and conditions that set out how it can be used. When it’s done right, reporting back to us on your Awards for All England grant is an important part of your relationship with us as your funder and it’s also useful to your organisation.

Below, we’ve set out some guidance to help with this, including what records you need to keep and for how long.

Your Awards for All funding should be spent within one year of receiving your funding confirmation email. However, we aim to be flexible where possible, so please let us know if you anticipate your project will take longer than 12 months to complete.

It's extremely important that the grant you receive from us is used for activities/items set out in your application or otherwise agreed with us. Your records need to clearly show what funding you received from us and how that was spent. We may ask to see copies of receipts, invoices and bank statements relating to your funding at any time during the project, and up to seven years after your project has finished. So, please ensure you keep records of the things you spend your funding on!

• Keep bank statements as a record of what you’ve spent.
• You can only withdraw up to £100 cash at a time and it must be agreed by two people running the project. Please remember to keep receipts for anything you buy in cash.
• If we ask for information and you are unable to provide it, or we can’t be sure you’ve spent the funding appropriately, we may suspend your grant. We may ask for funds to be returned to us or decide not to offer you funding again in future.

Please remember to keep a record of how your project has benefited the community. We may ask to see online links to information about the project, advertising materials, photos, testimonials, or feedback from the people who have benefitted from the project, and anything else that you think shows us how your project is going.

Although you don’t need to send us project updates unless we ask for them, you do need to let us know if:

• The main or senior contact for your project changes
• You require longer than 12 months to finish the project
• You've finished the project and have more than £1,000 of funding left over
• Your project supports different people than originally stated in your funding application
• You want to make changes to the project and spend the funding on things not specified in your application
• You can no longer carry out the project.

To get in contact with us, please email grantmanagement.bc@tnlcommunityfund.org.uk or contact our Advice Team on 0345 4 10 20 30.

And finally, please remember to check the terms and conditions before starting your project! You can find more information on how you should manage your funding and how long you should keep records for in our financial controls and financial governance guidance.

It's important that people involved with your project and your community understand that it's been supported by National Lottery players – putting our logo somewhere easily visible on your website or social media helps to do this. You can download our logo to use, as well as accessing other helpful materials relating to publicising your grant.

Follow The National Lottery Community Fund on social media: we're on Twitter (@TNLComFund), Facebook (@TNLCommunityFund), Instagram and LinkedIn. Use the #NationalLottery hashtag to include us in any social media posts relating to your National Lottery funded project.

Good luck with your reporting!