Nonprofit Budgets: How to Get Started Nonprofit Finance Fund

Nonprofit budgeting is a crucial aspect of managing a nonprofit organization’s finances. It helps ensure that resources are allocated effectively to achieve the organization’s mission and goals. This step-by-step guide with practical details will help you create a well-structured and efficient nonprofit budget. The annual budget focuses on the nonprofit’s planned financial activities, expected revenue sources, and expenditures for the fiscal year ahead. While the annual budget is the primary financial plan, organizations often use other types of budgets to manage different aspects of their finances. Creating a budget is a cornerstone in establishing the financial health and sustainability of your nonprofit organization.

Get smart about budgeting

The key is identifying your revenue streams and making realistic estimates for each. This helps you plan better and avoid financial surprises down the road. This guide and accompanying spreadsheet template break down the process of understanding true program costs, either through budgeting or financial reports, into several stages. Rushing the budgeting process could cause errors, which could result in future issues – especially troubling for nonprofits who need to report their finances and budgeting to grantors. Proper budgeting can help make sure you use resources effectively, prevents overspending and ensures the financial health of your organization. Still, creating a solid nonprofit budget is an essential foundation for being a financially healthy organization and having the basis you need to go about advancing your mission.

Revenue

Without an annual nonprofit budget, you’re essentially operating in the dark. You could easily overspend, winding up deep in debt or worse – unable to continue serving your beneficiaries. The best practices we shared in this guide are the fundamentals of sound budgeting for nonprofit organizations. To help you get started, we’ve created a basic nonprofit budget template to track your revenue and expenses.

Review Past Financial Data

This template should include line items for all of the above expense categories, as well as others that may be specific to your organization. Once all expenses have been accounted for, you can then begin to allocate funds to each category. When we discuss budgeting here, we are typically referring to an operating budget, the budget of income and expenses to operate the nonprofit. An operating budget is a budget that is used to cover basic day-to-day costs like materials, supplies, rent, utilities, etc. It’s not designed to cover large expenses such as capital projects, i.e buying a building. For example, if the organization’s major sources of income are donations and grants, then the budget may need to include funds for fundraising activities and grant writing.

• This is where your budget becomes an effective management and operations tool.
• If you don’t know what your goals are, your budget plan will fail to reflect them, and you might end up overspending on programs that don’t further the core purpose of your mission.
• Budgeting is a crucial part of keeping your organization on track and solvent.
• By now, you’ve created a solid foundation for a super-effective nonprofit budget.
• But look beyond basic mathematical averages when building projections.
• A nonprofit budget template Excel creates is pretty similar to a nonprofit budget template Google Sheets does – so don’t be overly concerned about the platform.

The module allows you to create detailed budgets, defining budget lines for different funds, grants, programs, and projects. A good system will enable the entering and approval of the to be final approved budget and then allow changes to the budget through amendments without changing the original approved budget. Budgeting goes beyond crafting a financial blueprint; it serves as a roadmap guiding your organization in allocating resources wisely and achieving its objectives.

Setting realistic SMART goals and objectives

For this step we recommend that contributed income that is unrestricted or general operating support be assigned to the fundraising category for the analysis. The final analysis will clearly show what program areas require these sources of support and enable leaders to make the all-important decision about how to best attract and direct flexible funds. If the organization has never allocated costs or overhead before, spend some time discussing the concepts and practices described in this guide. One of the most valuable results of understanding the true cost of programs is the ability to make wise choices about how to support mission critical work. For most nonprofits, some programs may be financially self-sustaining or even generate a surplus. Other activities may require periodic or ongoing subsidy from fundraising or other program areas.

This process is easiest for fixed expenses, which stay constant each year. For example, the rent for your office is likely a fixed expense due to your contract with the building’s management company. However, you’ll also have variable expenses that change each year and may be more difficult to forecast. For instance, the costs of program materials and necessary transportation will likely shift over time. Additionally, you’ll indicate whether these funds will come from program, management and general, or fundraising activities. Once you’ve created your nonprofit budget, you’ll be on track to secure financial stability and sustainability for your organization.

You also want to pay close attention to different budgets within your nonprofit’s plan. A budget describes your project in numbers just as a proposal describes it in words. Often funders will look at the budget component of your proposal before they read anything else. To help you through the budgeting process we’ll walk you through every line item you might need to include and show you how to create your own nonprofit organization budget template. Budget-to-actual performance should be reviewed monthly by both management and the Board. Budget-to-actual variances could be a sign of personnel issues, funding problems or poor financial management.

Operating budgets vs. program budgets 🤔

For a lot of our Grant Writing Made Easy students, the difference between actual budgets and projected budgets is a challenging concept to grasp. This approach gives you a realistic picture of your expected income, helping you plan more accurately. Get the https://nerdbot.com/2025/06/10/the-key-benefits-of-accounting-services-for-nonprofit-organizations/ input of your volunteer head, executive director, fundraising leader, and other department heads into the budgeting creation.