What is your biggest challenge with your budgeting process?
Comment below, it can be for either your organization's annual budget, or related to managing grant budgets.
Supplementing the conversation from our webinar with Jitasa, Budgeting, Forecasting, and Reporting: A Plan for Financial Success. Watch here.
Comments
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Accurately predicting our revenue.
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One of the biggest challenges I find with budgeting is the amount of time it actually takes to create a balanced budget.
In my past life as a CEO of a nonprofit, we were on a calendar year. We started the budget process for the next year right after Labor Day, thinking that would be more than enough time to get them ready for the Board. The amount of time it takes to gather estimates, quotes, look at grant cycles, forecasting program enrollments, etc... is ALWAYS longer than you think. Plus the first round of budgets never made the cut. Staff put all of their WISH list items in that first round of budgets. We'd look at round 1, give feedback to staff and say try again. Every year, we went through 2-4 rounds of "finessing" the budget until it was ready to present to the Board. Even then, the Board often had their own tweaks that needed to be made,
So to answer this question...TIME...was always the biggest challenge in creating budgets. Give yourself lots of it.
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Yes, I agree with this! The same seems to hold true for budgets specific to grants too. We just put out a blog post today about planning for grants. It includes a tool to help identify the most important elements to include in grant budgets. Have a look here!
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I agree with @AndreaFilz, being able to accurately reflect anticipated income and cash flow.
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