A charity can do a great deal of good while being surprisingly uncertain about where its most important records live. The treasurer has the financial statements, the executive director has the contracts, someone on a former board holds the original minutes and the bylaws may be sitting in an old folder with no obvious version history. None of those problems is unusual. Together, though, they can make the organization much harder to govern.
The Canada Revenue Agency requires registered charities to keep adequate books and records. Its guidance explains that those records must allow the agency to verify revenue and donations, understand the use of resources, confirm charitable purposes and assess continuing compliance with the Income Tax Act. The examples include ordinary financial records, but also contracts, governing documents, bylaws, written agreements and meeting minutes. Those documents tell the story behind the money.
Importantly, CRA doesn't impose one retention period on everything. Copies of official donation receipts generally have a minimum two-year retention period from the end of the relevant calendar year, while many financial statements, returns and source documents fall within six-year requirements. Governing documents and meeting minutes are generally kept for as long as the charity is registered, with further requirements following revocation. A board should check the precise rule before it disposes of a document, particularly where a special gift or other obligation is involved.
The agency also recommends keeping records in an organized, accessible place, with backups. Electronic records can be used, but they must remain properly readable and available in the required manner. Hiring an accountant or bookkeeper doesn't shift the charity's responsibility to maintain complete and accurate records.
Now consider a grant that spans several board terms. The current directors may be able to find the payment history, but not the resolution approving the project, the agreement setting the restrictions or the correspondence explaining a change in scope. If a question later arises, the missing context becomes the problem. The answer may have been entirely reasonable at the time, yet difficult to reconstruct from disconnected files.
A board handover should therefore include the live obligations, outstanding questions, records-retention requirements and significant agreements, not merely a transfer of passwords. Binder's Matter-based approach provides a way to keep a particular grant, contract or governance issue connected to the documents and decisions that belong with it. The responsibility remains with the charity and its directors, but the information doesn't have to be scattered every time someone changes roles.
These CRA requirements concern registered charities. A nonprofit that isn't a registered charity may have different statutory and reporting obligations and shouldn't assume that charity-specific rules apply to it.