Ultima modifica: 30 Giugno 2025

How to Calculate a Nonprofit Operating Budget

nonprofit operating budget

Often, liabilities are accounts receivable, or bills your nonprofit needs to pay. That can include a mortgage loan, a vehicle loan, or other lines of credits. It’s important to have all of your financial reports and receipts in order so that you’re ready for a state or IRS tax audit process.

nonprofit operating budget

Resources

  • It’s important to budget because it helps the organization manage its funds in a more effective way.
  • This process is easiest for fixed expenses, which stay constant each year.
  • For one, they’re designed to reinvest any extra money back into the organization rather than take it out as income for business owners.
  • Learn how to create a customized template that supports your grant-seeking success.
  • This audit will determine if the previous year’s resources were managed appropriately and inform the following year’s budget.

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. It will work as a framework https://nyweekly.com/business/accounting-services-for-nonprofits-benefits-and-how-to-choose-the-right-provider/ regardless of your nonprofit’s area of focus. Operating budgets reflects the organization’s planned financial activities for the year ahead, showing how much revenue it expects from which sources and how much it will spend on operations.

nonprofit operating budget

How Volunteer Leaders Impact Capital Campaign Success

nonprofit operating budget

If your nonprofit has the financial flexibility to budget for a revenue surplus, do so! When your predicted income exceeds your projected expenses, you’ll be more prepared to course correct if you incur unexpected costs or some revenue sources fall short of your goals. Plus, you can use any funding you don’t spend to build your organization’s reserve funds, which contribute to long-term sustainability. Google Sheets is a great tool to use for creating nonprofit budgets due to its ease of use and robust features.

nonprofit operating budget

Nonprofit Development Budget Template

To get a true picture of the cost to operate your nonprofit, include in-kind donations (materials, services, etc.) and volunteer labor in your budget. We had a client a while back with expenses over $600,000 a year for programs…. You also must allocate funds to cover expenses related to your professional facilities. That could mean paying for monthly rent, the lease on an office space, or the mortgage on a recently acquired building. Additionally, the facilities category covers utilities—such as water, electric, gas, Internet, and trash/recycling—and upkeep for the building, parking and landscaping.

The Ultimate Guide to Nonprofit Budgeting (+ Free Template)

  • By allocating funds to specific programs and initiatives, you can track and manage expenses more effectively and ensure that resources are distributed appropriately.
  • Such changes could include the addition of new funding sources or new restrictions dictated by existing donors.
  • Nonprofits are used to working on a budget even when running major fundraising initiatives, like a capital campaign.
  • This means that the money behind the balance you see in your account is held at a reputable bank, and most importantly, is protected for you in the event of Currencycloud’s, or our, insolvency.
  • These numbers will often be estimates based on your goals or what you earned and spent last year.

Therefore, it can be helpful to establish these first and figure out what’s left. While you should consider everything, be as realistic as you can in setting revenue projections. While it might be less than ideal to underspend when your organization has the capacity to spend more, it’s far worse to overestimate fundraising or grants and end up scrambling to cover costs. Your operating budget should be reviewed at least quarterly, or even monthly, to track progress and identify any potential problems.

  • A capital budget typically includes things like building new facilities or acquiring new equipment needed to meet the demands of increased demand for services provided by the nonprofit organization.
  • The budget also plays a key role in forcing organizations to prioritize their activities so as to determine those that are most critical for fulfilling their mission.
  • The budget is typically developed at the beginning of the fiscal year and is updated periodically as the organization’s financial situation changes.
  • However, if your nonprofit organization mainly runs activities in the summer months, you might decide to run a campaign during the spring.
  • Alongside your nonprofit business plan, you’ll be able to supply potential grant funders with a confident budget that confirms you’re a worthy investment.

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These templates are specially designed to cater to the unique needs of nonprofits, allowing for detailed income and expenditure projections. A capital budget is a long-term financial plan that covers major investments and projects needed to strengthen your organization over time to sustain its growth. A capital budget typically includes things like building new facilities or acquiring new equipment needed to meet the demands of increased demand for services provided by the nonprofit organization. The first step in creating a nonprofit budget is to determine the organization’s financial goals and objectives. This will help to ensure that the budget is aligned with the organization’s overall strategy and that resources are being allocated in a way that supports the achievement of these goals.

  • When determining how to allocate funds, it is important to consider the organization’s overall goals and objectives.
  • You may have heard of the 65/35 ‘rule’ of nonprofit expense allocation, which states that nonprofits should spend at least 65% of their funding on programming and no more than 35% on overhead.
  • Looking at just total revenue or total expenses can mislead you about how big an organization actually is.
  • Now, if we had described that money as a rainy day fund and that our Board set a policy that we would have 3 months’ worth of expenses in the bank, that might have been different.

#3 Nonprofit Grant Proposal Budget Template

nonprofit operating budget

There are many resources to assist you with creating your own budget after you’ve considered all of the direct and indirect costs of your project. Project budgets should outline your overall spending plan for your entire project, from successfully executing it to evaluating its impact and sustainability. Operating budgets are easier to develop because you can estimate the amounts based on the day-to-day costs in your organizational budget from the prior year. There are several types of grant budgets you might use in a grant proposal. Each nonprofit will have its own optimal overhead allocation, depending on its age, size, geographic location, and specific needs. It can be tricky to accurately predict how much you’ll raise accounting services for nonprofit organizations from each source and categorize these funds appropriately.