Budgeting for Programs, Grants, and the Organization

This workshop provides an overview of how to build, present, and use your organization's annual fiscal-year budget as a critical tool for financial planning and monitoring. Topics include a framework for building an inclusive budgeting process, developing an effective budget structure, creating cost and income projections, scenario budgeting and cash flow projections. We will look at planning for shared and administrative costs, and discuss how to develop program and grant budgets that are coordinated with the overall organizational budget to achieve maximum cost recovery. Finally, we will review considerations for presenting a budget for board approval, as well as how to monitor the budget throughout the fiscal year and commit to ongoing analysis and projection.

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is for nonprofit leaders, including board members and staff at all levels, who want to better understand their organization’s annual budget, improve a budgeting system, or more effectively participate in the budgeting process. In addition to budget managers who are directly responsible for building and managing the organizational budgeting tool, executive directors, program managers, fundraising staff, and board members can all benefit from this course.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Assess your organization’s effectiveness in its budgeting process and identify areas for improvement.
• Understand the value of connecting annual budget planning with establishing
• your overall organizational goals.
• Effectively estimate total program costs.
• Compile a realistic income forecast.
• Identify who should be involved in monitoring the budget.
• Explore different budget to actual report formats that meet the needs
• of various audiences.