Schedule Five holds your compliance position, live.
Most consultancies leave you a report. Schedule Five is the working system underneath our advice: the Act and the IFR's rules encoded as structured requirements, with your club's evidence, people and deadlines mapped against them. The name comes from the schedule that carries the four mandatory licence conditions, which is where the ongoing work lives.
What it does
From where you sit: your club's position against the rules, held in one working system.
- Gap analysis with citations. Your club's status against every requirement, requirement by requirement. Each entry names its source in the Act or the IFR's rules, so when the board asks why something matters, the answer is a paragraph reference.
- Ownership evaluation under Schedule 1. Model your owners and officers against the five owner conditions, including indirect chains of majority stakes, joint arrangements and nominee holdings, and track each person's determination status with the IFR.
- Evidence library with an audit trail. Every document versioned, tagged to the requirement it evidences, with validity dates and a record of who changed what and when. If the IFR ever examines your submission, the provenance is already there.
- Notification log. Record notifiable events as they happen, with their statutory deadlines calculated for you. The annual declaration is then generated from the log, instead of being reconstructed from memory every May.
- Deadlines derived from the rules. The reporting calendar, the financial plan window of 17 to 31 May, the governance statement, the fan consultation report by 15 August, the annual declaration window of 1 May to 1 June, all computed from the encoded rules for your club. Nothing is typed in by hand.
- Application pack assembly. Forecasts, personnel statement and evidence pulled together against the IFR's published application requirements, with the gaps visible before you press submit.
- Adviser view. For accountants, auditors and law firms supporting several clubs: one dashboard across every club you act for, with each club's data properly separated.
What it looks like
The same marking the free checks use, held live for your club rather than answered once.
Every requirement carries a verdict and its source. A worked extract:
- Red card Financial plan for the licence period. Not yet prepared on the IFR's mandatory forecasting template. Act, Sch 5 paras 2 to 3.
- Yellow card Fan consultation. Supporters are consulted, but not on all the matters the condition specifies, and the meetings are not minuted to an evidential standard. Act, Sch 5 paras 8 to 9.
- In place Corporate governance statement. Drafted, board-approved and evidenced against the IFR's code. Act, Sch 5 paras 4 to 7.
An operating licence commits the club to reporting every year, indefinitely.
Built on the rules
Current as at 1 July 2026, versioned as the IFR revises
The platform is built on the IFR's Licensing Rules, Licensing Guidance and Provisional Licence Application Guidance as published on 1 July 2026, layered over the Football Governance Act 2025 itself. The two layers are versioned separately, because the statute is stable and the IFR's specifications are not. When the regulator revises a template, a window or a guideline, the platform gains a new rules version and your position is reassessed against it.
You can see the interface itself: six screens of the platform, set against a worked example club. Or ask for a live walkthrough against your own club's structure instead: thirty minutes, no charge, no obligation.
How the platform fits the services
Schedule Five is included in retained support, and every assessment and implementation engagement builds your club's data inside it from the first session. The platform keeps the position current; we supply the judgement on what to do about it.
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