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Progress billing template for NPOs

my name is Sarah tapar and I'm an experienced manager within the nonprofit and grantmaker advisory practice with BDO who in partnership with the Wallace Foundation designed at the strong nonprofits. org website this website brings tools and resources for Effective financial management to organizations throughout the nonprofit sector the purpose of this video is to walk through the nonprofit budget template that is available for download here on strong nonprofits. org understanding what it actually costs to on your organization's programs is a critical first step in making good financial decisions including knowing where to focus fundraising efforts or where to reduce expenses this tool helps you do that by building your organization's Budget on a program by program basis and also by helping you to understand the financial impact of each of your programs on the organization's bottom line and to inform strategic decisions at the leadership and board levels here you can see your revenue and expenses laid out on a program by program basis with the toal Surplus or deficit for each program shown here in the bottom row before we get into the tool itself we are going to review a couple of important budgeting Concepts that will help us understand the design and functionality of the tool first we have the distinction between natural and functional expenses natural expenses are expenses classified by the nature of the expense examples include salaries rent utilities supplies and so on functional expenses on the other hand hand are expenses classified by the type of activity for which the expense is incurred in the nonprofit sector that would be distinguished among programmatic management in general or administrative and fundraising if you are familiar with the statement of functional expenses which is one of the financial statements found in a typical nonprofit audit you will be familiar with this format looking at an example of a statement of functional expenses you can see the rows on the left represent expense categories including salaries payroll taxes and employee benefits rent and so on the functional expenses are represented in the columns here you can see the first four Columns of numbers are different programs with the fifth column representing total expenses for program Services followed by management in general and fundraising which make up the supporting services another way we think about grouping expenses in the nonprofit budget template is the distinction between what we call specific and shared expenses specific expenses are expenses that can be specifically assigned to one or more programs or functions based on time or money spent directly on that program or function examples of a specific expense include salaries for program Personnel those expenses are specific to the program that those staff members work on compensation for fiscal staff is also a specific expense because it is an expense directly encourag by this Finance function of an organization one of the administrative or management in general functions the same with fundraising expenses staff salaries or expenses associated with a fundraising event or activities are all specific to the fundraising function in contrast to a specific expense we have a shared expense shared expenses are split among some or all programs and functions as they benefit more than one program function organizations allocate shared expenses amongst the different areas that benefit from those services on the basis of an appropriate allocation methodology we will talk about that more when we look at the tool itself some examples of shared expenses are rent and utilities of an office or common space if we have an organization in which all of our programs share a physical space we don't write a separate rent check for each of those programs we write one rent check and then we allocate the expense to the programs that work out of that space so if we bring up the statement of functional expenses again we can see some examples of specific and shared expenses looking at the natural account categories on the left examples of specific expenses include accounting and auditing fees which are specific to management in general and fees which are specific to only three of the four programs as well as management in general examples of shared expens expenses include rent and utilities which have expenses across all program areas m& and fundraising and office expenses and insurance shared expenses are allocated ing to an allocation methodology which we will discuss when reviewing the template itself the first tab of the spreadsheet contains instructions if you have any questions that aren't answered in this demo you can find a line by line guide to this template on the instructions tab that will give you the basic functionality and what should go into each element of the spreadsheet most importantly yellow highlighted cells are where you should enter data gray cells have formulas and are autoc calculated red text denotes Specific Instructions for individual tabs finally there are many plus buttons that you can click on to expand for additional rows and columns you can see the first instruction on this screenshot relates to inputting the names of your programs into the revenue and summary tab so that is where we will go next on the revenue and summary tab you'll want to specify the names of each of your program areas the tool has space for up to eight program areas in addition to management in general and fundraising this is the one exception to the rule that any cells meant for data input are highlighted in yellow on this page you'll customize the names of your programs in the blue row number five across the top where you currently see the names education outreach program 3 Program 4 Etc while there's room for up to eight programs you do not have to use them all you'll see a minus button above column K which you can click collapse programs 4 through 8 for instance once you customize the names of your programs you'll then want to customize the rows that you see in yellow here in column A you'll adjust the rows that are currently labeled as Professional Services materials and supp supplies travel occupancy Etc to reflect up to 12 summary categories grouping your expenses in a way that is helpful to organization leadership to see and understand the budget now that you have set up your framework we'll move into expense projections you're now going to populate the Personnel tab the top section of the Personnel tab is related to full-time staff or staff who are eligible for benefits in the sample data entered here you'll see that the executive director is entered with a salary of $145,000 a projected $5,000 annual increase and is expected to work for 12 months then you'll enter an estimate of where the executive director spends their time here being 15% on education 10% on Outreach 10% on program 3 40% on m&g and 25% on fundraising it's typical to see an executive director's time spread like this the totals column on the right will tally the percentages you always looking to ultimately total 100% then we will enter the remainder of our full-time staff their salary budget and how they spend their time across the different functions one functionality built into the spreadsheet which you may find helpful if you look at the program director row you'll see that this person is projected to be employed for 10 months you're still entering their annualized salary but the spreadsheet calculates the cost of that position for 10 months instead of 12 this column can be helpful with new positions that aren't expected to start at the beginning of the fiscal year as well as to reflect any leaves of absence that staff may be taking without pay there are different ways to come up with these time percentage assignments you could base it on job descriptions you could use time sheet analysis or you could discuss directly with the staff however you do it ensure that it's a realistic reflection of how each person is spending their time now we will enter any part-time employees here in the part-time section it works in a similar way to the full-time section with the difference that after entering the total months that position will work you will also enter the percentage of time that the person in that position will work this allows for some flexibility as there can be many different types of part-time positions in this instance an instructor's estimated annual cost is $222,000 with a projected $2,000 yearly increase this instructor is a seasonal position as they are employed for 3 months in the summer so we indicate three 3 months of the year employed at 100% of full-time during those 3 months you'll see that this person spends time mostly supporting the education program with 20% of time spent Outreach and 20% of time on program three the operations coordinator is also a part-time position but this position is employed throughout the year so 12 months at 50% of the time and is fully assigned to the m&g function if this position was a one day per week position you would enter 20% instead of 50% if a person is solely devoted to a particular program or function you put a 100% in the appropriate cell to reflect that all of their working time is spent on this purpose in the totals column all the way to the right you always want this total to be 100% even if the position is part-time the bottom of the Personnel tab will show total salaries total Fringe and total Personnel costs both for the organization and by program or function we also see the number of FTE or full-time equivalents in each program or function of the organization we see that both on an absolute basis and on the basis of Which percentage of the total number of FTE each program or function represents that will be important later because this percentage is one of the ways we will use to calculate shared costs if you don't know your effective Fringe rate for your organization you can scroll to the bottom of the Personnel tab where there is a calculator to help derive your Fringe rate you'll enter your total annual expenses for each of these typical Fringe benefit categories and the spreadsheet will calculate your effective Fringe rate for fulltime and part-time employees then you take that number and enter it into the appropriate cells in the full-time and part-time sections Fringe rates for fulltime and part-time staff are usually different because typically part-time staff are not eligible ible for the same level of benefits as full-time staff for example medical plans and retirement benefits are usually restricted to full-time staff or staff will work a certain number of hours per week now we are moving to the non-personnel expenses tab we are going to enter specific expenses in the First Column these should all be natural expenses things like supplies travel consultants and so on in the columns under the program and function headings enter the actual dollar amount budgeted to each program for each expense in our example here we have funds for printing materials for the education program area and the fundraising function budgeted we also have $1,500 in notebooks budgeted for the education program $11,000 in snacks budgeted for the outreach program and $5,000 in travel for a Regional Conference budgeted to the m&g function we have program Consultants specifically budgeted for $10,000 in the education column and $5,000 budgeted for program 3 finally our audit expense is a specific expense to the finance function so we have $155,000 budgeted in the m&g column for the audit next we enter our organization shared expenses the ones which each function or program of the organization shares in you'll see shared expenses allocated by FTE or full-time equivalent the FTE methodology is a common method to use as the basis for your allocation of shared costs as cost allocation methodology should be rational systematic and result in an allocation of shared costs that is reasonable shared costs that are used by all of your staff members about equally should be entered here and the costs will be automatically spread across programs and functions in the template based on the FTE percentages that we calculated in the Personnel tab you'll see in this example we've put a couple of common categories of shared expenses things like office supplies paper and internet charges those are spread on a percentage basis across the different columns based on the calculations of FTE from the Personnel tab the final section of this spreadsheet is where we can enter shared expenses that we might choose to allocate on some basis other than FTE rent and occupancy costs are one example that we see here in this case say we're assuming that the space used for programming is significantly higher than the space used for administrative staff so we might allocate those costs on a square footage basis rather than an FTE basis we've calculated offline somewhere how much of the overall facility square footage is used by each of the different areas in this example the education program uses 50% the outreach program uses 20% program 3 uses 10% m&g uses 15% and fundra fundraising uses 5% all based on the square footage of the facility that they're using other possible cost allocation methodologies that might be used in this section could be something like number of students or number of program participants again for any expense category that doesn't track with numbers of Staff or FTE you might calculate using a different basis in this section to see your organization's total expense Budget on a dollar basis we can click on this detailed expense budget tab this is an output only tab in this screenshot we've collapsed the detail but in the actual worksheet tab you will see all of the expense details here rather than the percentage calculations for personnel as seen in the Personnel tab you will see dollar amounts assigned to each program and function for each personnel and non-personnel line item in the budget along with the total expense budget by program or function and a reflection of the percentage of the total for each moving to the revenue and summary tab we will see a similar framework but in this case directed at the revenue side of of the budget contributed Revenue includes foundations corporations individual contributions satisfaction of program restrictions and government grants or contracts for these line items for example where it says Foundation a corporate contribution major donors Etc you can simply overwrite the words with specific names what we will do then is enter our expected revenue on a functional basis to reflect which program or function within the organization that revenue is restricted towards this hypothetical has a few examples already built in we have Foundation a which gives a grant of 40,000 that's specific to the education program Foundation B gives the organization a grant of $30,000 for outreach and Foundation C gives a grant that is unrestricted or for General operating support so it is reflected in the fundraising column another option for these funds is to reflect them in the m&g column we also have individual contributions of $240,000 reflected in the fundrais column then we have a category called satisfaction of Prior year restrictions this is where you're going to reflect any restricted funding that you may have received in Prior years and plan to use this year it may have been restricted by time or by purpose this is not new funding you're going to recognize from an accounting perspective but it is funding you will use as part of your operating budget which is reflected as restricted net assets on your statement a financial position or balance sheet here you can see that we're reflecting $25,000 from Foundation a in a prior year Grant to support the education program and $40,000 from Foundation D from a prior year Grant to support the outreach program finally we're reflecting $225,000 from a state contract specifically to support program 3 also have some earned Revenue in this case we have $10,000 in registration fees for the education program which is reflected here you can also put other revenue on the revenue and summary Tab and a reminder that you can overwrite the words in the First Column based on how you want your Revenue categorized finally we can see the total revenue organization wide 670,000 and the revenue by program or function after inputting all of our Revenue we're going to scroll to the bottom of this worksheet where we have our total projected expenses of $665,000 based on a total projected operating revenue of $670,000 we can see the budgeted bottom line for our organization that we are budgeting at a surplus of $466 each program will also have its own bottom line so you can see the education program is budgeted at an approximately $133,000 deficit the outreach program has over a $119,000 surplus and program 3 has over a $29 $9,000 deficit so we can see here where we might need to raise additional funds Target our fundraising efforts or even reduce expenses it gives us a lot of information about our organization's business model in this case fundraising is generating over a $285,000 excess of the cost to run the fundraising function so you could think of this as how much money fundraising is bringing in to subsidize the loss generating programs and functions now that youve built out your budget you will want to review it with some considerations in mind on this slide we are including some questions that might be helpful during this review process does the budget align with our long-term financial goals does it reflect considerations for investments in capital and building organization reserves does the budget align with our organization strategy does it reflect our organization's values does it represent our community's needs have we built in a surplus or deficit into the the budget if we have a deficit do we have the Reserves to finance this deficit how does this budget compare to Prior years is the organization growing or Contracting if there are funds to be raised do we feel confident that we can raise that gap which line items or areas show significant increases or decreases in the budget compared to Prior years have certain core Services grown substantially are there adequate resources in place to support the growth with these questions you may be making some additional changes to your budget that will help ensure it will best serve your organization's needs that gives us a quick walkthrough of the nonprofit budget template one of the tools here on strong nonprofits. org I hope this proves to be a useful tool for your organization and remember that there are many other tools and resources available for strengthening your nonprofits financial management here on strong nonprofits. org so I hope you check out the entire site thank you for joining me today and for using strong nonprofits. org