Best Practices - Budgeting
{"Image DocumentName": "Best Practices - Budgeting", "Image ImageDescription": "Practice income-based budgeting. Analyze and understand your revenue concentrations. Confirm your budget s relationship to your mission and long range/strategic goals. Don t forget infrastructure. Budget for capital in addition to operations. Provide narrative notes to explain budget assumptions to the board. Pay attention to presentation. Good budgeting practices: 1.Practice income-based budgeting. Budgeting is a form of risk management, and the most reliable budgets yielding the best fiscal results for the organization are conservative and income based. This means: \u2022Budget for income first. Base income targets on realistic expectations and only include reliable income in the budget. Never include an income projection that simply fills the gap to cover expenses. This sets the organization up for a budget deficit if the organization fails to hit the plugged income targets. \u2022Take care to understand the impact and timing of restricted contributions and releases on the operating budget. \u2022Ensure expenses are lower than the dependable income total. This requires cooperation among all departments in setting organizational and programmatic priorities, timing new or adventuresome programs. 2.Analyze and understand your revenue concentrations. Is your organization overly dependent on single source of revenue? In many cases, lack of diversification of revenue sources can pose a serious risk to the financial stability of an organization should a single large revenue source become unavailable. There is no universally right mix of revenue sources - the right mix for your organization depends on your particular circumstances, your mission, your industry, your staff capacity, and even the age of your organization. 3.Confirm your budget s relationship to your mission and long range/strategic goals. Confirming the budget s relationship to mission requires answering questions such as: \u2022 Does the expense budget reflect the mission priorities of the organization by the way resources are allocated? \u2022Are we being pulled off course by going after grants just because they are available, even if they don t support identified mission priorities? \u2022If we are implementing programs that are not high mission priorities, are they at least contributing substantially to financially support the organization. 4.Don t forget infrastructure. Folks who work for small and midsize non-profit organizations generally are very hard workers, intensely devoted to mission accomplishment, often working longer hours at lower pay than their for-profit counterparts. They deserve good tools and will perform even more efficiently and effectively with ongoing professional development opportunities and skills training. (Budget to send them to that Excel class!) Include information technology upgrades and maintenance, evaluation, and staff development costs in the budget. High quality programs can best sustain and grow with a well-trained and well-equipped staff, both program and administrative, to support them. Budgeting to provide good pay and benefits for staffers is also a way to keep those well-trained folks with you. 5.Budget for capital in addition to operations. An organizational budget should take into account the organization s annual operating income and expenses, as well as ensuring resources for long-lived and/or non-operating needs - this is the capital budget. An organizational capital budget might cover several years and it should include target amounts and fundraising strategies to achieve strategic and financial sustainability goals. These could include: \u2022 creating or increasing an operating reserve. \u2022deficit reduction. \u2022furniture, equipment, or software purchases. \u2022leasehold improvements. \u2022a building & equipment maintenance and replacement fund. \u2022a fund to support new program initiatives, experimental pilot programs, etc. \u2022a human resource capacity building fund. An organizational capital budget is different from a capital campaign budget, which is usually for bricks-and-mortar or other finite project(s), although they could be related. For more about budgeting for capital, see Budgeting for Capital. 6.Provide narrative notes to explain budget assumptions to the board. Board and finance committee members will appreciate explanations to help them understand the underlying thinking behind the numbers in the budget. \u2022It goes without saying  that it is best to use a spreadsheet program to build budgets, but if notes are too many or too wordy to fit conveniently into spreadsheet cells, the notes could be written in a word processing document. Whether or not narrative notes are in a separate document, be sure to add letter or number keys to associate each note to the related spreadsheet line. \u2022 I ll say it anyway: it is best to use the right tool for the right job and let the software work for you. Please, never use word documents for budgeting - it s just plain dangerous - the spreadsheet will do a more efficient and accurate job of adding those numbers up and will automatically revise the totals when changes are made. 7.Pay attention to presentation. Your budget could be brilliant, well-researched, and well-documented, but if it is unreadable, your work will be undermined. Budgets that are easy to read and understand are well-formatted. Characteristics of good formatting: \u2022columns and rows are well-labeled using font size, boldface, and underlines to create emphasis and for clarity, \u2022colors used for shading are chosen with black/white printing in mind, as not everyone will have a color printer (lighter color shading under dark fonts or lighter font colors for darker shading - dark fonts over intense colors are sometimes not readable when printed on non-color printers), \u2022column headers and row labels are carried to any second pages, \u2022enough detail is included, but not too much, \u2022narrative notes are given when appropriate and are keyed to the data they refer to, \u2022print parameters are double-checked before sending out electronic copies to avoid paper waste, Try sending out as PDF. \u2022footers include the file name and the work sheet name to assist with locating electronic version locations, \u2022consistent file naming protocols are followed to assist with version control (ORG FY10 Budget (Sept 21), then save new version as ORG FY10 Budget (Oct 5), and so on to have the latest version stack last in the Budget folder). Having an inclusive and thorough budget process, a conservative approach, documented policies, efficient budget tools, and well-formatted budget presentation that tells your mission story by the numbers positions your organization to have the best results.", "Image XResolution": "37", "Image YResolution": "37", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Centimeter", "Image Software": "SlidePlayer", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Centered"}