Budget: Budget is a financial plan. All of us know what is budget as we do make our financial plans in our personal life also. Planning is an important part of budget and unless it is done in a systematic and planned way, the project may end up with shortage of funds or under-utilisation of funds in some or all heads.
Though we are all doing budgets, this may help you in refreshing the plans/ideas. As we all know, before starting a project we do the project planning by doing the need assessment and identifying the issues and then designing the project. While designing the project we also need to look at the financial aspects of the projects such as the programme costs, staff, administration etc.etc. In the same way when we plan the financial plan (budget), we also need to look at the project in total and accordingly the financial planning (budgeting) needs to be done.
I. Programme/Activities:
1) Let us look at the activities that are planned
2) Prepare a financial plan to successfully take up the above activities
3) The financial plans could include e.g. training programmes, meetings, income generation programmes so on so forth depending upon the type of project you are taking up.
4) You should have a detailed planning for each and every activity i.e. for example let us take health awareness camp:
- a) Number of Camps: How many likely camps during the project period
- b) Number of days each camp runs for: If the each camp runs for 3 days you need to do the financial plan first for a day then calculate it for 3 days.
- c) Number of Participants for each camp: How many likely participants for each camp and how much travel, food and lodging would cost for each participant. In some cases, some participants depends on their daily wages – may also have to compensate them etc.
- d) Number of Resource Persons : For each person what will be the expenditure on consultancy fee, travel, stay etc. for each day. Then multiply the same with the number of days.
- e) Cost of hiring of vehicles/fuel costs during the camp
- f) Stationery required – clearly plan item-wise and their cost g) Audio Visuals, pamphlets etc. All the things needed for organizing a camp needs to be planned.
Here we have taken example of one activity of a project – like that for each activity we need to do the budgeting.
Also other important point that needs to be discussed is whether all these come under Administration or some of them could be part of the programme costs if they are related to programme even if the nature of payment is say administration e.g. hiring vehicle for a workshop which is approved under programme costs.