Beginner’s Tips for Nonprofit Budgeting

Creating the first budget for your new nonprofit? Or are you a new board treasurer and inherited a budget or budget process that really needs “upgrading?”

Monte S. Meyers, writing in Blue Avocado, provides some excellent, practical tips for involving the right people in the process, creating your budget, and monitoring it once it’s been adopted. Here are just a few examples:

• Establish a clear budget development process. Who plays what part, and by when?
• Develop a written set of “budget assumptions”—the information and thinking used to develop the numbers.
• Use a budget spreadsheet or budgeting app that identifies each of the areas that make up your budget.
• Be conservative in your revenue estimates.
• When you can, enter realistic monthly numbers, rather than just dividing a total by 12.

Read Monte’s full article in Blue Avocado.