Scottish Charity Financial Profiles - OSCR

Scotland's registered charities from the official regulator (OSCR) as clean, per-charity records - number, name, status, purpose and beneficiary categories, regulatory type and the reported income and expenditure figures. Child-related charities and all address and free-text fields are removed.

What one record represents

The source is the Scottish Charity Register bulk download from OSCR at www.oscr.org.uk (a daily keyless ZIP holding one CSV). Each record is one registered charity organisation: charity number and name, known-as name, registered date, status, constitutional form, geographical spread and main operating location, the charitable purpose categories, the beneficiary categories, website, volunteer and staff counts, regulatory type, parent-charity linkage, and the reported income and expenditure figures (total and by category).

Sample output

Real rows from a live run of this actor (first 5 rows, selected columns).

One full record from the same run, exactly as delivered:

{
  "record_id": "SC000001",
  "charity_number": "SC000001",
  "charity_name": "Stoneyburn Community Education Centre Assoc",
  "registered_date": "26/06/1986",
  "known_as": null,
  "charity_status": "Not Submitted",
  "constitutional_form": "Unincorporated association",
  "previous_constitutional_form_1": null,
  "geographical_spread": "A specific local point, community or neighbourhood",
  "main_operating_location": "West Lothian",
  "purposes": "'the advancement of education'",
  "beneficiaries": "'No specific group, or for the benefit of the community'",
  "website": null,
  "volunteers_involved": null,
  "number_of_staff": 0,
  "most_recent_year_income": 11337,
  "most_recent_year_expenditure": 10674,
  "mailing_cycle": "2024"
}

Search and rank charities

Question: Which active environmental charities operating mainly in the Highland council area have the largest income (for a funder or sector review)?

{"purposes": ["environmental"], "locations": ["Highland"], "statuses": ["Active"], "sortBy": "income", "maxRecords": 10}

Run on 30 Sep 2026 this matched 214 charities and returned the top 10 by income (10 × $0.05 = $0.50 on Apify's Free plan):

Number	Name	Income (£)	Expenditure (£)	Location
SC053005	The Kilchoan Melfort Trust	32,355,835	8,280,448	Highland
SC051542	Andrew Wemyss Charitable Trust	9,188,760	82,905	Highland
SC047971	Coigach Community Development Company	2,567,404	543,428	Highland
SC029635	New Start Highland	2,216,234	2,356,194	Highland
SC039673	Community Energy Scotland Ltd	1,870,292	1,716,548	Highland
SC022504	ILM (Highland)	1,870,135	1,769,556	Highland

Search options (all optional; a record must match every option you set, and several values in one option match any of them):

• Name (contains) (names) — charity or 'known as' name.
• Purpose (contains) (purposes) — words from OSCR's charitable purposes, e.g. environmental, health, poverty, animal welfare, sport.
• Beneficiaries (contains) (beneficiaries) — e.g. older people, disabilities.
• Main operating location (contains) (locations) — council area, e.g. Highland, Glasgow City.
• Status (statuses) — Active, Not Submitted (annual return overdue), Not Monitored.
• Constitutional form (contains) (constitutionalForms) — e.g. SCIO, Trust, Company.
• Minimum income (minIncome) — most recent year, in pounds.
• Registered from / to (fromDate, toDate) — newly registered charities.
• Rank by (sortBy) — income, expenditure (largest first) or newestRegistered. The actor reads the whole register (about 25,000 rows) and keeps the top ones.

Every option is tested on each register row after the child-safety exclusion, so filtering happens before Maximum records. "No charities match" (nothing charged) is a successful run; if the OSCR download fails the run fails as a source failure. With no search option the actor delivers the register in its own order exactly as before. OSCR's licence conditions still apply to what you do with the results: no direct marketing, and a derived list must not be presented as the official Scottish Charity Register.

Coverage and the mandatory exclusions

Default changed on 30 Sep 2026: if you leave maxRecords out, a run now returns up to 10 records (it was 500). Set maxRecords yourself to get more — the maximum is unchanged.

The complete register holds 25,003 charities. This cell delivers 14,720 eligible records after two mandatory exclusions applied before anything is emitted:

1. Child-safety row ban - any charity whose Beneficiaries field names Children or young people is removed entirely (10,283 rows). This is a hard row-level exclusion, verified on every run and re-checked by a planted-row test.
2. Column drops - the Postcode, Principal Office/Trustees Address, Notes, Activities, Objectives and the free-text what the charity is set up to do and how it does this fields are never selected. What remains is organisation-level: charity number/name/status, purpose and beneficiary categories, regulatory type and the financial figures.

You raise Maximum records to pull the whole eligible set or lower it to sample.

Licence

Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator (OSCR). Open Government Licence v3.0 (OGL v3.0): free to copy, publish, distribute and adapt, including commercially, with attribution. OSCR adds two conditions, honoured here and quoted for the buyer: the data must not be used for direct marketing, and a derived list must not be represented as the official Scottish Charity Register.

Sibling Actors

The fleet's UK charity-eligibility lookup covers England & Wales (a different regulator and a lookup, not the Scottish bulk register), and the US exempt-organization master file covers the IRS registry; there is no row overlap with this Scottish regulator dataset.

Fields, scheduling and integration

Every field in the record is either a source-native identifier, a source-native attribute, or one of the six provenance fields (source, source_dataset, licence, attribution, caveat, observed_at) the fleet attaches to every record. Nothing is derived or inferred beyond the small, documented transforms noted above, and nothing is dropped silently - the handling section spells out exactly what is excluded and why. The grain is one record per the natural unit of the source, which keeps each row independently meaningful, keeps the key stable across runs so re-running is a cheap upsert rather than a re-import, and lets you aggregate up to whatever unit you need without unpicking a pre-joined table.

Because the source republishes on its own cadence, a scheduled run keeps a downstream table current: new and changed records upsert over the old ones on the stable key, and the observed_at stamp tells you when each was last seen live. Set Maximum records low to sample the shape of the data cheaply, then raise it once the cell fits your use; the Actor streams or partitions its source, so memory stays flat regardless of how many records you request, and you are billed only for what is delivered. The output is a flat table of typed records, so it drops straight into whatever you already use: load the run's dataset over the API or an export, key on the record id, and upsert. Because identifiers are preserved exactly as the source publishes them, joins across the fleet's cells - and onto your own systems - work without a mapping layer. There is no subscription and no minimum: the per-record price and the record cap together mean the spend on any run is known in advance and matched exactly to the data you receive.

Reconciling counts honestly

Where the live count differs from any previously published figure, the live measure is the honest one and is what this listing quotes; sources re-issue and re-version their data over time. The run receipt always states what was actually delivered and charged and confirms the two agree, so every run is auditable against itself regardless of what any external index expected.

Scaling, scheduling and support

A common pattern is a light scheduled run that pulls the newest slice into a staging table, then a merge on the stable key into the table your product reads, so you never re-pay for rows you already hold and your history grows cleanly over time. Because the record shape assumes no particular warehouse, language or tool, the integration work is a load and a merge, not a cleaning project: the same code path handles a 40-row sample and a full pull, and the only thing that changes between them is the record cap. If you only need a slice, the cap and any partition or filter inputs bound the run precisely, so a targeted pull costs cents rather than the price of the whole set, and a broad pull is simply a higher cap left to run. Nothing about the delivery is subscription-gated: each run stands alone, priced at exactly the records it returns, so you can dial spend up or down run by run as your needs change, and a scheduled cadence keeps a downstream table current without any standing commitment. When the source publishes a correction or a new period, the next run picks it up and upserts it over the stale row on the same key, so the table you maintain stays both complete and current with no manual reconciliation.

Provenance and compliance

Every run reads the door host's robots.txt at runtime and records the result (URL, status, byte length and, where a policy is served, its SHA-256) in the run's RUN_RECEIPT. Where the host serves no applicable policy - a 404, a 403, or a homepage redirect - the gate records that as a flag and proceeds on the licence, which grants re-use; a flag is never treated as permission in itself. The endpoint is keyless and the Actor reads only the public data door - never a mirror, and it never bypasses a block.

Data quality and freshness

Numbers arrive as real numbers, booleans as real booleans, and every other value as a string or null, so the dataset loads without a cleaning pass. Each record is keyed on a stable composite of the source's own identifiers, so it is safe to diff, deduplicate or upsert. Every run re-reads the live door, so the data is as fresh as the source publishes, and each record's observed_at stamp dates the snapshot. The receipt records how many rows were delivered and charged and confirms charge_equals_delivered.

Billing, delivery and joins

Pricing is per record: you are billed only for records the Actor actually delivers, and the charge is raised after each record is pushed (push-then-charge), so a failed or empty run costs nothing. The Maximum records cap bounds every run, so spend is known before you start - sample cheaply, then raise it. Every record is a flat, typed object keyed on a stable id, so it loads without a cleaning pass, diffs cleanly between runs, and upserts into a table you keep over time; re-running keeps that table current without re-paying for rows you already hold, and each receipt reconciles delivered against charged. Because the source's own identifiers are preserved verbatim, the dataset joins onto other sources keyed on the same identifier.

Who buys this, and how they use it

This cell is bought by teams that need the source's published set as a typed, keyed table they can hold and refresh rather than a page they scrape: market- and macro-intelligence teams sizing and tracking a market, data engineers wiring a clean upstream feed into a warehouse, and compliance and research teams building on a stable identifier. The grain and the key are chosen so the output is a building block, not a one-off export - you run it on a schedule, keep the delta, and join it to your other sources on the identifiers it preserves verbatim. The spend on any run is the per-record price times the records delivered, matched exactly to what you receive.