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Billing template excel for non-profit organizations

all right here we are I'm gonna show you how I develop the cash flow document for a small nonprofit and this is available on my website and this is the document that you can use so you can follow along maybe with this on a different screen while you figure out your cash flows so here are the documents that would really help make this easy for you the first one is do you have an annual budget I have on this spreadsheet an example of an annual budget that I use when I talk about how a non-profit can put a budget together you'll see that this is like a one-page 12-month budget yours just might be the totals you know this column over here which is fine you can definitely that's a great place to start if that's all you have but this is just an example so that's the first place to start what do you have a budget if you have a monthly idea of how this is gonna look what you can do is you can take like well let's take March April May June you can cut and paste those and say I'm gonna take these and I built an example one where I take that under Michael here's March April May June July for this hypothetical nonprofit here's the income that I think we're gonna make and then down here here are the expenses that this nonprofits going to make so if you have something like that great if all you have are these totals you can always just divide these by 12 and then put monthly numbers and if you need to guess well how much I'm going to spend in March how much in April for averages for estimates and then you can get really a lot more specific well you know some of these numbers may be it always happens in a certain month and if it's not in the next few month then it's zeroed out the other document that would really help you is getting let's say the last two bank statements actually from your bank what that's going to do is it's going to show you remind you in a very immediate way what are the charges that you have on a monthly basis because the charges from the last couple months you're gonna be able to tell those oh yeah that's a recurring recurring charge for MailChimp or whatever it is that's our website hosting that's you know staff costume you'll actually see the dollar amounts that's really important for right now the other thing I want you to do is to login to your bank account oops I left this data here delete that login to your bank account tell me well you don't have to tell me but however much money is in there right at this very moment put it in this yellow field so let's say you've got forty seven hundred dollars okay did you see how these things populate so the way this document works is this is the money that you expect to make in the rest of March I'm recording this on March 14th this is the money that you expect to make these are the expenses that you expect to have in March so let's say for example you are waiting on a check for $5,000 you have forty seven hundred dollars in the bank you're waiting on another five grand but your staff costs or six grand right just to make this easy let's make these old dollar signs okay your staff costs are six grand and we're and you can get more specific and obviously you can change these things around as well so if you don't have a fundraising cost tied to anything and you want to call this something else just change it around whatever works for you so you're expecting to make five but you're gonna spend six let's just start with that for a second just look at how this document set up you have forty seven hundred you're gonna make five in March but you're gonna spend six so you're gonna end the month down a thousand that makes sense thirty seven hundred and again you can see that up here you started with forty-seven hundred you spent a thousand dollars more than you made so you end down what makes this really useful is this this cell right here that's a formula where it just takes it from down there so then you start April okay I start April 3700 you're not gonna make any but the there's a big state grant that comes in on that big let's just say 3,500 and you have a meeting with an annual donor for another five so you make that money did you see up here how these numbers did change by the way but of course you still have another six grand and staff costs in fact let's just move that forward and you can see how of course this somehow my formula didn't quite get there did it you're seeing we build the plane as I fly it I guess let's just make sure my yeah yeah okay we're good here okay so what you see here we've got these costs of 6 grand for staff we can see some revenue and then these numbers adjust up here where you start the month with is at the top and what you end the month with is at the bottom and this number 5,800 that you ended june with in this scenario goes up here to July and then of course you lose 6 grand boom you're now in the hole so what I've done is I've put together a sample as I said five months of cash flow for a hypothetical non profit this non profit has a big grant that they're expecting that's going to be great for them I will point out they're starting with a lot of money in our example they're starting with eighteen thousand dollars in the bank which is great for them good for them and I will say I actually chose that in for a really good reason their expenses are two hundred and seventy nine thousand for the year is what they budgeted and let's just do some math here two seven nine five five four divided by twelve that tells you your monthly burn right in this case this nonprofit goes through twenty three thousand dollars a month right to seven nine five five four divided by twelve right so when we think about that that eighteen thousand might feel good because like especially if you're a much smaller nonprofit but for a nonprofit like this that's not even a month in reserve so that might actually end up being a scary number and we're gonna see how that ends up playing out so what I've done is I've taken their annual budget that they put together these numbers right here these numbers right here and I put them into this spreadsheet and you can see that they're going to start this period budgeting wise with eighteen thousand dollars and they're going to end it with ninety five thousand dollars good for them but here's the important part and the main reason why I'm recording this on March 14 2020 is that your nonprofit is probably facing a dire scenario due to the Cova 19 virus and the possible economic collapse I'm recording this at a time of great uncertainty and this is gonna help you figure that out so if you can put in let's just say like here's the normal money that we think we're gonna make normal normal now let's start figuring out where things go wrong this fundraising event in April virus probably means that's not going to happen we're gonna remove 60 grand but fundraising costs if you can do some research maybe you have paid six grand of that instead of twelve so we're gonna make it six grand and if it's useful you can go in here and you can make a comment and you can say half of what's expected actually here's a really good to end then you can see that there's a comment so that you can remember but here's a really good time that I should just mention this is really meant to be it's a cash flow document so it's really determinants of like when the money is actually spent if you use accrual accounting this money is allocated here because that's how accrual accounting works and if you're a cash basis which just means it depends shows up on the bank statement whenever it was earned then don't worry about the accrual accounting for a second but basically what I want you to know I'm really trying to investigate when the money is leaving your account that's what we care about the most here so when we look at this or in getting to the account so let's actually let's go back to this because it's possible we're just gonna leave that as is for a second okay let's actually go from it this way let's just look at March are we getting this state contract in March $2,500 state contract that actually seems pretty likely to stick around states might be running out of money right now but contracts are contracts and they're not going to try to get out of it most likely so we can probably count on that this $10,000 if it is not actually in the bank right now if the check has not been mailed this is a really difficult amount of money for many nonprofits to rely on right now so use an executive director gonna have to decide is this happening is this not that might be your first call right now find out about this big grant for now let's just assume it's not gonna happen or let's assume that they say oh man I don't know I'll give you 2,500 now and we'll see where we end up so we'll just leave that as is maybe you can expect that you can collect maybe we think it's gonna be over by June so we'll just kind of budget first twenty seventy five hundred there that's guessing that's all we're doing right now we're just to give ourselves some ideas of how this might go key staff here's a question so you put in the money you see what you've actually been spending over the last couple months this might be budget if you have a budget or again look at the actual money going out see what's left to pay maybe you've actually already paid half for March maybe you pay every other month so we actually you can say half of this forty five hundred now you get to see me do math on the fly 2850 I think it gets us there now eighteen fifty ha ha that one is calculated as a percentage you can decide to change that if you want to medical insurance that's probably paid either paid or not let's just say that I you we've this hypothetical nonprofit has already paid it contact contract grant writing this is the kind of thing where an executive director might say you know what I'm gonna not do this I have to do it right now because they've already done the work but I'm gonna put that on hold for a little bit program expenses we're gonna have to do this but maybe we can do some belt-tightening I'm gonna make it seven hundred like that fundraising costs nothing here this is a time where again if you had a cruel accounting and you're like and this is where you're just allocating it but you actually have to have written a check or you're going to be expected to write a check or you can't get out of the check you would actually put it here in March or wherever you think that it actually shows up you probably can't get out of your rent or some of these other things might be locked in in some way depreciation isn't actually real money in terms of what's coming out of your account so for this purposes of a cash flow will delete it professional development I think right now no conferences are happening anyway so we're gonna skip that one two grants if you're getting a grant in April it's probably because you know that you're getting this this seems likely for this nonprofit they still get their state contract ok so we're going through looking at these this is one where we're saying well the fund raisers we think that we're going to be able to get rid of some of our or delay some of you these expenses we want to bring it back obviously later so some of this might not actually be coming out at this very moment from our budget but we still are going to something so we're gonna make this three grand actually travel that conference is off so that's not paid anymore let's see what else we have $15,000 grant now we're getting kind of far out as you notice here this is a really big question at this point are we hoping that we get it some people say that you should budget for just to give an example here three times the amount of money for grants that you want to actually get so if you want to get $30,000 in grant you need to apply for $90,000 something like that but to get a grant in May to actually receive the money in this budget that means you've probably applied for it in like March or April maybe earlier but maybe maybe we think that one's coming but these were like oh man do the granting agencies even have any money are they pulling back let's just assume we're not getting those business support businesses don't have any money right now fundraising mailing whoo that's a turkey one are we willing to leave that in so you can kind of see some of these decisions that are making as I go through this the other thing to think about is this situation creating issues that are going to cost you more money for whatever reason if you have a service that is somehow impacted you might have to maybe dramatically increase these program fees to serve that there might be other expenses that are unrelated here that are hard too hard for me to predict hard for me to budget for but you can get that idea of generally how that document works the main thing that you're looking for is like get March like start with March really think about like okay where am I ending March that 10,000 carries over here because of this $50,000 grant this nonprofits actually doing pretty well because now they end with 40 great for them 40 well we're actually looking for our anytime we end the month down here with a negative if we said you know what this $50,000 grant isn't happening what happens up here we end April $9,200 in the hole we start May $9,200 in a hole and it gets worse each month so then you have this situation if this is you because many nonprofits I think you're going to be facing this situation where what was a positive cash flow is now a negative cash flow they're gonna have to look down here and say well that new staff that I hired I'm gonna they're you know first in last out or something that's a really hard decision to make and I don't envy you if that's one that you're doing are lastin first-out had that backwards excuse me we're gonna have to we can't we can't support them right now how are we doing we're still starting we're still ending May down these fundraising costs that we think that we're gonna oh you know what we're gonna see if we can come to some sort of arrangement where we can pay $1,000 a month for three months to make right on that so what are we doing we still end April and 4,000 probably can't get away with with that yeah okay so now we're now we've got a real question here so I did create a staff worksheet where again you can see if you want to lay these things out in terms of like who your staff actually are their monthly salary if you want to actually start deciding like okay we're actually gonna really need to here's my example again we might have to do some further laughs our cutting that's a place to explore that you could explore you know what happens if we take ten you know 10% off of every one is that enough for a limited time or something like that the other thing you could do is say we are just going to start really really pushing our fundraising and our major gifts we know that some people aren't hurt by the situation right now although again uncertainty is in some cases the worst so even the people who could afford right now to do something or not but you're gonna go to your best donors you're gonna go to your board and we're gonna get 3,000 we're gonna get 2,000 and that gets through April I know that because that we end with nine hundred and forty three dollars and may because of this fifteen thousand dollar grant we can still get through with a little bit there as well after that after I would honestly say after about three months the reliability of a document like this you really are just guessing at some point at some point it's just it you know it's like it's not worth the exercise I really find these documents to be valuable for roughly around three months I've included other months here because you can see trends coming and you can react to them you can pay attention to them but maybe not as much it's like what's happening in these three columns another thing that I want to encourage you to do if you're if it's really tight like if you're not ending March with the right amount of money then the next thing to do is to say third week of March fourth week of March first week of April etc and then really break it out and then start going through this week by week by week when is the money coming in when is it going out what can you delay these kinds of situations can be really scary for an executive director as I'm sure you're already feeling in my experience it is easier to put numbers to it to really investigate what is mate what is what is gonna make this work what is gonna make it better if you if you are in that terrible situation where you have to furlough an employee or you know lay them off or whatever that situation is knowing that it's because you did this because he went through this exercise maybe even sit down with your treasurer and board president and work with them or show them after you've done it and say this is what I'm thinking I see a cliff edge in you know admit in in April or again the second week of March or fourth week March or whatever it is showing them what you're seeing you can always talk about ways to raise money but right now that is really uncertain some of them like this might be workable but even that you know what if the person who writes the check for this date is home sick all of these things might be up in the air so you can refer to a document like this often you can really use it to that end to try to give yourself some clarity to try to understand what's happening with your nonprofit in terms of the money coming in the money going out I do think you should look at this first on your own if you can don't bring in a bookkeeper yet frankly because you still want to you know have to lay off the bookkeeper who helped you figure out that you don't have enough money to pay her I would I would look at a board member possibly first look at this information figure out what what's workable it's scary it's hard but I think that I think that this is we're spending the time it's only you know once you get the data in here it's an hour maybe of really like spending the time trying to learn these you know learn how your system works cash flow wise and just watch for watch for these negatives when do they happen and what can you do are there opportunities here that are realistic or are there difficult decisions that have to be made here do you have debt options that could put some of these things off in the very short term these are conversations to be having with your treasurer or Board President or both full executive committee maybe needs to be called in for something like this to really get a sense of what you're facing I hope that's helpful again I have a blank one here I'm gonna make a blank again right now this one is the one that you can use it is ready to go and you can still use some of these other things if you want to put your own information into this budget you can totally do that and then you can cut and paste here's the staff worksheet if you want to do some work there I have my example again if you want to see play around with something that has numbers just to see how the numbers work and then I also really like having some assumptions this is just a place where I keep track of the assumptions that informed the budget in this case but you might be able to use these assumptions to remind yourself what this looks like what does this assume you know state grants are coming in but fundraisers are off or whatever it is I hope that's helpful good luck out there