Parochial fees, the electoral roll, synod elections, the patronage clock, the statutory registers, the quinquennial cycle, closures, glebe and the diocesan filing calendar. Every one of them is a legal obligation with a date attached — and almost none of them is served by a national system.
The national platforms handle what the national church needs. The diocesan duties — the ones the registrar asks about — have historically lived in one person’s spreadsheet and one person’s memory.
Not a reminder list somebody maintains. Fee returns, APCM dates, filing deadlines, licence expiries and inspection due-dates are derived from the records — so the date moves when the underlying fact moves.
Under the Patronage (Benefices) Measure 1986, a patron who does not reply is treated as having approved. That is a legal state change caused by nothing happening — so the system advances it daily rather than waiting to be asked.
Every statutory area records what was decided, when, by whom, and against which instrument. When the registrar, the auditor or a tribunal asks, the answer is a record with a date on it.
Each area is a working module, not a form to fill in — with the instrument it answers to named against it.
| Area | What the platform does |
|---|---|
| Parochial fees | Quarterly fee returns per parish, DBF and PCC shares split per fee row, assigned-fee elections, and sequestration accounts during a vacancy. Overdue returns surface as a list, not a memory.Parochial Fees and Scheduled Matters Amending Order |
| Electoral roll & APCM | Roll numbers by year, PCC elections, churchwarden admissions, PCC officer records and charity status — with the annual revision and meeting dates tracked per parish.Church Representation Rules |
| Synod & elections | The current triennium, deanery representation allocations against a band scale, elections and results, and synod motions with recorded votes.Church Representation Rules |
| Patronage & vacancies | The patron register, per-benefice statutory vacancy timelines, and the section 7 to section 13 timers — including deemed approval where a patron does not respond within the statutory period.Patronage (Benefices) Measure 1986 |
| Licences & PTO | Licence events, expiry tracking, and a compliance view that will not let a permission outrun the DBS check behind it.Diocesan practice; safeguarding policy |
| Statements of Particulars | Issued, varied and reviewed — held against the post and the person, so the current version is never in doubt.Ecclesiastical Offices (Terms of Service) Regulations |
| Conduct & discipline | Cases recorded under either regime: the Clergy Discipline Measure 2003, and the Clergy Conduct Measure 2026 once commenced. The regime is a property of the case, not an inference from its date.CDM 2003 · CCM 2026 |
| Capability & grievance | The employment-side processes that sit beside conduct, kept distinct from it and separately permissioned.Terms of Service |
| Abuse redress | Held at the strictest access tier in the platform, with retention protected against erasure requests.Redress scheme |
| Vocations & lay ministry | Candidates through discernment and training, ordinations, and licensed lay ministers with their own licence lifecycle.Diocesan discernment process |
| DAC & faculties | Casework, meetings and outcomes, plus the committee itself — membership, expertise and a composition check against the statutory schedule. Faculty applications stay in the national portal; the platform links to them rather than duplicating them.Faculty Jurisdiction Rules, Sch. 2 |
| Quinquennial inspections | Inspectors, appointments, recommendations by urgency, and report distribution — the cycle as a cycle, not a folder of PDFs.Inspection of Churches Measure |
| Closures & churchyards | Closed churches and closed churchyards recorded as the distinct legal states they are, with the maintenance liability that follows.Mission and Pastoral Measure |
| Glebe & property | Glebe parcels, parsonage inspections and property compliance certificates with their renewal dates.Endowments and Glebe Measure |
| Registers | Banns and marriage licences, burial register entries, churchyard capacity, and the sacramental record.Marriage Act · registration law |
| Schools & SIAMS | Church schools with their governance category, governor appointments, and SIAMS inspection history.SIAMS framework |
| Diocesan filings | The governance entities, their trustees, declarations of interest, and a filing calendar that computes each deadline from the entity’s own review date.Companies Act · Charities Act |
| Returns chase | Annual returns opened per year with their due dates, and a single view of who has filed and who has not.Statistics for Mission · Return of Parish Finance |
| Safeguarding retention | A 75-year retention floor enforced against the retention policies themselves — and an erasure request that touches safeguarding material is placed on legal hold rather than actioned.National safeguarding retention guidance · UK GDPR |
A compliance module that can send mail is a compliance module that can send the wrong mail to nine hundred people at three in the morning.
Everything overdue surfaces as a list, a badge or a report your team chooses to open. Nothing in the statutory suite contacts a parish on its own.
When a return is late, a person decides whether the right response is an email, a phone call or a quiet word at deanery synod. The platform tells them it is late; it does not decide for them.
Outbound mail across the whole platform runs through a guard that caps recipients per message and messages per run. Bulk sending is a decision somebody makes, not an accident somebody has. How the guards work →
Where a scale or a taxonomy has to come from the diocese — a representation band, an urgency label, a fee split — the seeded value is marked as provisional on screen until yours replaces it.
Where the law is mid-transition — CDM to CCM, the faculty portal to its successor — the record carries which regime it sits under. Nothing is inferred from a date and quietly re-interpreted later.
Conduct, redress and capability are gated separately from everything else. A module being in the platform does not mean the office can see it. Permissions & GDPR →
Every deadline computed from the record behind it, with the route to the underlying case one click away.
Most compliance software tells you what you already did. The useful kind tells you what the law is about to require of you — and how long you have.— Why the statutory suite computes dates rather than storing them