Nonprofit Budget 2025: Steps, Planning, Examples & Template

Nonprofit organizations need physical space to conduct their work, including office space and employee parking. Even if you operate within a virtual working environment, you’ll likely have facilities expenses, such as work laptops or technology reimbursement for your team. Staff salaries are often the largest expense for any organization, whether a 5 Main Benefits of Accounting Services for Nonprofit Organizations nonprofit or a small business.

• Things like utility, bills, office supplies, and software subscriptions may seem minor on their own, but when combined they can create significant overhead costs that eat into your budget.
• Although considering natural expenses is helpful during the planning process, your final budget should use functional expense categorization to match your financial reports.
• The basic purpose of budgeting is to control and manage the organization’s financial resources.
• The National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) revealed that there are currently 1.5 million nonprofit organizations registered in the United States.
• Creating a budget for non-profit organizations requires balancing mission impact with financial sustainability.

The 9 Essential Tips for Managing a Budget for Non-Profit Organizations

One way to stay on top of your nonprofit budget practices is to utilize some of the many budget templates that can be found online. This sample budget for nonprofits is a template for an organizational budget for a fiscal year. This includes program expenses, staff salaries, an operating budget and other expenditures.

FREE Fundraising Plan Template for New Nonprofits

• However, the budget should be high-level enough so as to not be cluttered and overwhelming.
• Moreover, the non-profit organizations which reported to the Internal Revenue Service had a combined revenue of $2.53 trillion in 2015.
• Spend the time to put some thought into creating a budget for your new nonprofit.
• You also want to pay close attention to different budgets within your nonprofit’s plan.
• You might not be able to predict what your donors give, but you can control a lot when it comes to spending.
• When creating a budget for non-profit organizations, understanding these core elements is essential.

This means that you have to keep a note of all the expenses your organization spends to continue operating successfully. Go through any financial statements that your organization has collected to have a better knowledge of the total expenses you deal with. Create a detailed list of the income and expenses for your new nonprofit business, which often covers the period up to beginning operations and a small amount of time after operations have begun. Startups will be easier to run if you have the right printable plan set in place to run it perfectly. Once you achieve your set of goals for the company, you can see its growth in the market easily. Every successful budget for non-profit organizations balances mission impact with financial stability.

Hire An Accountant or Use Accounting Software to Help

His growth-hacking abilities have helped Donorbox boost fundraising efforts for thousands of nonprofit organizations. It’s also very important to the success of your programs that your revenue and expenses estimates are realistic. While there is generally space for hope and dreams in the nonprofit world, when it comes to budgeting – there isn’t. When putting in the numbers for your revenue, make sure you know exactly where your funds will come from. Monitoring your revenue and expenses should ideally become a part of your nonprofit’s organizational culture, something everyone is aware of and contributes to. Mark the events in everyone’s calendars, so that it becomes easier to repeat the process each year.

Total Up Your Figures

Download it so that you may then open and make whatever changes you need to until you can have the budget document you need. If you https://nerdbot.com/2025/06/10/the-key-benefits-of-accounting-services-for-nonprofit-organizations/ are going to start making your nonprofit budget, then you should know exactly how you should go about in doing so. In order to help you out with that, here are the steps that will allow you to properly create your very own nonprofit budget. This ratio tells you if you have a healthy balance of funds to support both overhead and programs. You can also use this to compare to your program and overhead needs to understand if you have enough in each type of fund to support your expenses.

• Explore all of the different sources of funding for nonprofits, popular funding models, and five simple steps for kickstarting a funding strategy for your organization.
• This budget includes expected income, expenses, and funding for a small nonprofit organization.
• A profit organization’s main objective is to earn profit, whereas nonprofit organization’s primary purpose is to help the needy people by collecting donations and grants.
• We’re diving into the harmful impact of inflation and sharing ways your nonprofit can weather the storm.
• The responsibility of creating your operating budget typically falls to your chief financial officer (CFO) or nonprofit controller.