Why make a budget?

Making a budget is centrally important to running an effective club — you need a budget before you can apply for funding (see How to: get funding & sponsorships), and in order to effectively spend the funding that you get.

How to make a budget?

Making a budget will likely take between 10 minutes and an hour to make a budget that will work pretty well, depending on your experience making budgets before and your knowledge of running a club.

Before you begin

Before you make a budget, you’ll want to have a good understanding of what your club will look like. A great way to do this is by completing the Semester planning guide. You don’t need to, but you’ll probably find it quite helpful.

Categorize spending

First, make a list of all of the categories of spending you expect to have. Some examples:

  1. Prizes for competitions
  2. Snacks/drinks for regular events
  3. Books (e.g. one you’re using for a Reading group)
  4. Advertising costs, like banners, posters, flyers, a spot in your school’s newspaper, etc
  5. Software subscriptions (e.g. Squarespace, Airtable, etc)
  6. Honorariums & travel expenses for speakers
  7. Merch (e.g. stickers, hoodies, etc)

Consider what else you might purchase. Imagine you had funding for everything on the list you just created, but nothing else — what would you be missing?

Estimate costs

For this part, it’s often helpful to use a spreadsheet (like Google Sheets) or the tool Guesstimate.

Make an estimate for your spending on each category over one year of running the club. It can be helpful to use a framework of “minimum,” “mainline,” and “ideal,” to represent the funding you’d need at each level.