Compliance guidance built for Scottish charities. Not a chatbot. Not a template.
The Charity Compliance Engine gives trustees, senior staff and volunteers the governance guidance they actually need, calibrated to their charity, grounded in Scottish law.
The compliance burden is real. The support has not kept up.
Scottish charities face a growing weight of regulatory obligation: OSCR reporting, trustee duties under the 2005 Act, GDPR, safeguarding, employment law, Gift Aid, health and safety. The guidance exists, but it is scattered across multiple regulators, written for lawyers, and rarely calibrated to a charity of your size and activities.
Most small and medium charities have no dedicated compliance resource. Trustees carry the responsibility personally. Getting it wrong carries real consequences, for the charity and for individuals.
Generic templates and tick-box checklists do not solve this. Proportionate, specific guidance does.
The solution
What makes it different
The Charity Compliance Engine is not a general-purpose AI tool given a compliance prompt. It is a purpose-built advisory system, developed through direct experience of working with Scottish charities as a trustee and adviser, and shaped by the kind of governance expertise that usually only large organisations can access.
Grounded in Scottish law and regulation
Every response operates within a defined framework of more than 60 Acts and regulations of Scottish and UK law. The engine never references legislation outside this scope, and never fabricates a statutory obligation.
Calibrated to your charity, not a generic charity
Before any guidance is generated, the engine builds a detailed profile of your charity: your income, activities, the people you work with, your governance structure. The guidance that follows reflects your actual circumstances, not a one-size-fits-all template.
A framework you build and agree, not a verdict you are handed
The session does not start by listing everything you lack. It starts with the short list of things the law actually requires of a charity like yours, each with its legal basis stated. From there, you and your adviser discuss what else is worth adding, and agree a document map your board owns. Nothing is imposed, and every decision is recorded.
Built on a curated knowledge base, not the open internet
The engine draws on a curated knowledge base built from Scottish regulatory guidance, real governance experience, and knowledge developed through direct work with Scottish charities. It does not search the web or generate answers from general training data.
Adviser-led during the pilot, by design
Stuart Gilliland is directly involved in every pilot session. This is a conscious decision: the pilot exists to validate the engine against real charities, refine the guidance, and ensure the outputs are genuinely useful before wider rollout. You are not a test subject. Your feedback directly shapes what this becomes. Pilot participants get direct access to the person who built it, for as long as that remains the model.
Outputs
What a session produces
A Charity Compliance Engine session covers six governance areas in a structured conversation with your trustees, staff and volunteers. At the end, you leave with:
✓ A plain-English compliance review across all six areas, proportionate to your charity
✓ An agreed document map showing what your charity has in place and what you have chosen to build, spread across realistic timescales
✓ Draft policy documents for the items you agreed to build, tailored to your charity
✓ A branded PDF session record your board can review and retain
✓ Word document exports of all draft policies for your own editing and adoption
Sessions typically run 60 to 90 minutes. No preparation required beyond basic knowledge of your charity’s activities and governance structure.
Beyond the session
Your charity does not sit still. Neither does this.
A session gives you a solid foundation, anchored in exactly what your charity does today. But charities grow. You take on staff, win new funding, start new services, change structure. Funders ask for policies you have never heard of. Trustees change. Incidents happen, and the board needs to know what to do now, not after weeks of searching.
When that moment comes, most charities are left to sink or swim in an ocean of advice: guidance written for English charities, templates that fit nobody, search results that cannot tell a SCIO from a CIC. The Charity Compliance Engine already knows your charity: your structure, your activities, the plan your board agreed and the reasoning behind it. You are not starting again with a stranger. You are coming back to an adviser that remembers you.
The engine’s capability is expanding all the time, and continuing access after the pilot will be available through a simple membership. Pilot charities join on founding terms.
Currently in pilot. Early access is free.
The Charity Compliance Engine is in active pilot with Scottish charities. Early access sessions are available at no cost, and pilot charities will join the ongoing membership on founding terms. In return, we ask for honest feedback that helps shape the tool.
If your charity is navigating compliance pressure and would benefit from a structured, expert-guided review, we would like to hear from you.