Keeping a trustee register, terms of office and DBS checks
Who the board is, when each term runs out, and keeping the safeguarding checks in date.
In The Charity Office: Governance → Trustees → New trustee
A trustee is not a login
Adding somebody here does not give them access to anything. It records that they are on the board, which is what half the rest of the system points at: who signed the minutes, whose action it is, whose DBS check is running out.
Giving somebody a login is a separate job, under Settings → People. Plenty of trustees will never need one.
Terms of office
"Term ends" is when their term runs out under the constitution. Fill it in and the Trustees item in the menu grows an amber badge ninety days before it happens, which is about the notice a committee needs to find a replacement.
Leave it blank and you will never be warned. That is the whole mechanism - there is no email and no reminder, just the badge and the coloured date.
When somebody stands down, turn off "Currently serving" and give the date. They stay in the record and drop out of the default view. Do not delete them: the minutes they signed still point at them.
Declarations of interest
On a trustee's own page there is a Declarations of interest list. "Director of the firm that does our grounds maintenance" is the sort of thing that goes in it.
A trustee with nothing to declare still counts - the board minutes that they were asked. Leave "No longer applies from" blank while the interest still stands.
DBS checks
Under Governance → DBS checks, record the checks the charity has had done. A DBS certificate never technically expires, so "Renew by" is the date your own safeguarding policy says to look again - we suggest three years when you put the issue date in, and you can change it.
The Status column is worked out from the dates rather than from what you chose: past the renew date reads Out of date, within sixty days of it reads Due for renewal. A check with no renew date never warns you about anything.
Certificate numbers are stored encrypted and never appear in any list. When somebody leaves, set the status to "No longer needed" rather than deleting the record.
Worth knowing. The Trustees list hides anybody who is no longer serving. Turn off the "Currently serving only" filter to see the whole history of the board.
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