What Your Campaign Reports, to Whom, and by When

Updated 2 October 2026.

A campaign owes accounts to three different audiences, on three different timetables, and most candidates only think about one of them.

Sorting out which is which is the difference between a compliance job done once in a panic and a routine that produces the filing as a byproduct.

The three people you report to

The IEBC, under the Election Campaign Financing Act framework. This is the statutory one. Section 10 of the Act fixes the two main deadlines, and the regulations the Commission gazettes ahead of each election set the content, the format and the exact dates. All of it applies to parties, to candidates and to independent candidates.

Your party. Parties impose their own internal requirements on aspirants and nominees, and those sit in the party's rules and nomination documents rather than in the electoral law. Read them before you pay the nomination fee.

Your own campaign. Nobody outside will ever ask for this one, and it is the report that determines whether you make good decisions. A weekly figure showing money in, money out, committed spending and the balance is the minimum.

What a campaign finance report contains

The shape is consistent even though the detail is set by regulation.

Contributions received, itemised by giver, with in-kind contributions valued and included. Expenditure incurred, categorised. Any loans or credit the campaign has taken. Balances held. And a declaration signed by somebody who takes responsibility for its accuracy.

That is why the register and the vouchers matter all year. The report is assembled from records, and a campaign with records assembles it in a day. A campaign without them writes an account of what it thinks happened. Related: how to keep the records the report is built from.

The two reporting deadlines in section 10

Reporting under the framework is periodic. Section 10 requires a party candidate to file a preliminary nomination expenditure report within 21 days of the party nomination. Every candidate then files a final expenditure report within three months after the election.

Beyond those two intervals, this article prints no dates and no thresholds, because they are set by regulation for each cycle and they differ by seat. Get them from the current gazette notice for the office you are contesting. Related: what the gazetted framework covers.

Then put every one of those dates into the campaign calendar on the day you read them, with a reminder two weeks ahead of each.

There is a persistent belief that the obligations sit with parties, and that a candidate running without one has fewer papers to file.

The framework applies to parties, to candidates and to independent candidates. An independent has no party secretariat to lean on, which means the work that a party office might otherwise absorb falls to the campaign itself. Anybody planning to run outside a party in 2027 should read the reporting requirements before deciding how thin to run the back office.

What the internal weekly figure should show

Four lines, produced every week by the treasurer and read by the candidate.

Money received since the last report, split between cash and in kind. Money spent, by category. Money committed but not yet paid, which is the line campaigns forget and the one that turns a comfortable balance into an overdrawn one. And the balance across every account and handset the campaign holds.

It fits on half a page. Its value is that it turns a vague sense that things are tight into a figure somebody can act on while there is still time to act.

Somebody has to own it, by name

Reporting fails when it belongs to everybody.

Give it to the treasurer, in the appointment letter, with the dates written down. Related: what that role is and who should not hold it.

The candidate still signs. Signing an account you have not read is a decision rather than an administrative step, so read it.

Keep the records, then put the dates in the calendar this week

The obligation to hold records does not end on the day a result is declared. Petitions, party disputes and queries about the return can all arrive afterwards, and the records are the only thing that answers them.

Decide before the campaign ends who holds the file, where it lives and for how long. A campaign that dissolves in August 2027 with its records scattered across four people's phones has effectively destroyed them.

Three actions, none of which takes an afternoon.

Find the current reporting requirements for your seat and write the dates into the campaign calendar. Name the person who owns each filing. And start producing the weekly internal figure now, in 2026, so that the first time anybody assembles numbers for your campaign is not the week a statutory return falls due.