Scotland Charity Register Change Signals

This is a change-intelligence Actor, not the Scottish Charity Register or a current-state directory scraper.

It compares successive daily official OSCR bulk downloads and emits compact organisation-level change signals. It does not expose contact records, reproduce the Register, or make compliance, misconduct, financial-health, insolvency, or marketing-target judgments.

Source and legal boundary

Live mode uses only OSCR's official public bulk downloads: the current Scottish Charity Register and former charities. Both are published daily. The Actor does not use the key-controlled OSCR API.

Data is sourced from OSCR. This Actor is not the Scottish Charity Register, must not be used as a replacement for it, and is not endorsed by OSCR. Outputs must not be used for direct marketing. Do not use this service for lead generation, outreach lists, marketing targets, or prospecting.

© Crown Copyright and database right 2026. Contains information from the Scottish Charity Register supplied by the Office of the Scottish Charity Regulator and licensed under the Open Government Licence v.3.0.

Signals

• NEW_CHARITY_REGISTERED: a charity number newly appears in the current active-side download. It means newly appearing on the Register, not necessarily a newly created organisation.
• CHARITY_REMOVED: an entity previously on the active side now has explicit evidence in the former download and is absent from active. A disappearance without former evidence is an anomaly and aborts the run.
• CHARITY_REINSTATED: an entity moves from the former side to the active side; it is not reported as new.
• CHARITY_NAME_CHANGED, CHARITY_STATUS_CHANGED, CONSTITUTIONAL_FORM_CHANGED, and PURPOSE_CHANGED report source-literal organisation changes. Purpose comparison is normalized, de-duplicated, and order-independent.
• ANNUAL_RETURN_RECEIVED requires the stable Mailing cycle + Year End filing identity to move forward and a receipt date to be present. A receipt-date correction within the same period does not repeat the signal.
• INCOME_CHANGED and EXPENDITURE_CHANGED are observational changes in the latest return values. They are not assessments of financial health or sustainability. Null transitions are suppressed and zero is handled without an invalid percentage.
• REGULATORY_TYPE_CHANGED, GEOGRAPHICAL_SPREAD_CHANGED, and MAIN_OPERATING_LOCATION_CHANGED preserve source-literal changes.

Each Dataset item follows the portfolio contract: signalType, entityId, entityName, detectedAt, source, sourceUrl, changedFields, before, and after, plus only relevant domain fields such as charityNumber, purpose additions/removals, financial values/deltas, ceasedDate, and removalReason. Raw rows are never put into before or after.

State and safety

The stable identity is the trimmed, upper-cased Charity Number, retained as the SC plus six digits string. The canonical snapshot stores only allowed organisation-level fields. Trustee names/details, principal contact data, principal-office or trustee addresses, email, phone, account-document contents, objectives, notes, and other individual-level data are excluded during projection and never enter the snapshot or Dataset.

The first successful live run creates a full canonical baseline, emits zero Dataset items, and returns BASELINE_INITIALIZED. A no-change comparison succeeds with zero signals. maxItems caps only Dataset output; the full validated snapshot is always committed.

The pipeline validates HTTPS host, HTTP status, MIME, ZIP magic, archive shape, required columns, UTF-8 CSV parsing, source generation-date alignment, minimum counts and sizes, stable keys, duplicates, overlaps, and relative count collapse. It records source URLs, byte counts, hashes, available Last-Modified/ETag, raw row counts, and internal generation dates. The current OSCR responses may omit Last-Modified and ETag; in that case their values remain null rather than being invented. Fetch time is not represented as an extract date.

Active and former generation dates must match. On a mismatch, unexpected disappearance, malformed source, write failure, or summary failure, the old snapshot is retained. Snapshot commit is the final operation. Removed is sourced from the former list and is not double-emitted as a generic status change.

OSCR notes that 02/06/2012 may be a default ceased date for charities removed before ceased dates were recorded. The Actor preserves ceasedDate as source-literal information but never treats every historical value as the exact removal date. New removal detection relies primarily on the dataset transition plus current former-side presence.

Input and sample mode

mode defaults to live while the Console prefill and example run use sample. Optional filters cover signal types and charity numbers, finance thresholds, baseline-only operation, and Dataset maxItems (default 100; prefill 30).

Sample mode is deterministic and isolated: it makes no HTTP request, opens no production named KVS, writes no production snapshot, uses the production normalization/diff/filter path, emits a non-empty Dataset covering the principal signal types, and returns snapshotUpdated=false.