Nonprofit Budget 2025: Steps, Planning, Examples & Template

Your expenses will include the costs of running your nonprofit organization; such as salaries, rent, office supplies, and marketing. To estimate your expenses, review your organization’s financial history and base your estimates on that. If you don’t have a financial history to review, tally up the expenses you expect to incur. A well-structured nonprofit budget serves as your organization’s financial planning roadmap, guiding decisions about program investments, staffing needs, and growth opportunities. This becomes particularly important when balancing mission-driven goals with fiscal responsibility, whether you’re running a local charity or a growing foundation.

Business Membership

• You should revisit your budget every month and compare it to your actual numbers.
• Nonprofit organizations must consider multiple funding sources, program sustainability, and the organization’s mission while maintaining fiscal responsibility.
• It typically requires getting income from multiple sources for nonprofits to thrive.
• There is a misconception in the nonprofit space that healthy and good nonprofits have low administrative and fundraising costs, and spend the majority of their funding on program costs.

Creating and making the most of a nonprofit budget isn’t a one-and-done job. You should revisit your budget every month and compare it to your actual numbers. This allows you to keep a close eye on your strategic plan for the year and where how your nonprofit is actually performing.

Annual Budgeting

If you’re one of the many nonprofits operating on a tight budget, Givebutter has you covered. Givebutter is a free, modern, all-in-one fundraising platform built with donors in mind. Marketing and fundraising encompasses all tools, supplies, and technology used to drive donations (i.e., the main revenue source for your organization). Get our FREE guide to nonprofit financial reports, featuring illustrations, annotations, and insights to help you better understand your organization’s finances. By simply gathering your data, making revenue and expense projections, and regularly reviewing and updating your budget, you’ve conquered a key part of the business of running a nonprofit.

Estimate your nonprofit’s income 💸

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. Timing could be affected by events, annual appeal revenue drives or large gifts. Note months that may have more revenue coming in or more expenses going out.

What Budgeting really is, and it’s Importance?

Gain clarity and control over your financial health with our Yearly Profit and Loss Statement Google Docs template. Seamlessly analyze your company’s profitability and identify areas for improvement. Using the budgets, you can determine where you’re losing and earning the most. Write down every possible expense you can think of, and then ask around to see what you’ve missed. Everyone in your nonprofit will have different expertise, so check in on what they might know that you don’t. Once your costs are set, you know precisely what numbers you can expect to work with.

Are there different types of nonprofit budgets?

A nonprofit budget template is an essential tool to control the financial resources of a nonprofit organization. A well-planned budget is the first step to planning the future of a nonprofit organization that helps to achieve the desired goals with limited resources. There is a collection of free nonprofit budget templates in Word, PDF, and Excel format that allows you to make better decisions for your organization. The nonprofit The Key Benefits of Accounting Services for Nonprofit Organizations sample budget helps you to create a perfect plan to manage the income and expenditure of the organization. Finally, budgeting software programs like Xero or QuickBooks are excellent tools for creating nonprofit budgets due to their ease of use and robust features.

Understanding Net Assets in Nonprofit Organizations: A Guide for Stakeholders

Once finalized, document your budget clearly and share it with your team and stakeholders. Transparency fosters trust and ensures everyone is working toward the same financial goals. Direct Relief is a great example of how contingency funds can help tackle unforeseen emergencies. It uses its reserve fund to manage unexpected costs during disaster relief efforts. In 2023, it allocated 46% of its program budget ($58.2M) for emergency disaster response. For example, Doctors Without Borders allocates a significant portion of its budget (over 80%) to direct program expenses, ensuring most donations fund medical care in crisis zones.

In our collection, you can find perfectly designed non-profit budgeting form templates that help you track your income and expenses efficiently. For a non-profit organization, donations and grants are may the only way to meet the expenses that they face in helping others. You can find a tremendous collection of donation receipt templates that you can use to let the donor know that the donation he/she has made has been received successfully. You can build out the line items in greater detail as you develop your budget, but beginning with these will give you a good start.

Context Is Key

• Address overhead costs transparently in your nonprofit budget and donor communications.
• A nonprofit budget should ideally have two sections – one for funding and one for expenses (including overhead and operating expenses).
• Step back and assess your fundraising strategies and how potential changes could affect your expected contributions.
• Enter project expenses in the same month-by-month columns to compare total expenses to total revenue.
• The budget should include realistic revenue projections based on historical data and current fundraising capacity.

These numbers help guide your business choices—a sample nonprofit budget will show you what to include. This is also sometimes called a “broad scope budget” or an “annual budget” because it gives you a full picture of what the coming year should look like. A nonprofit operating budget template can help you make sure you’ve hit all the bases. It’s important in the nonprofit world for organizations to develop and follow financial budgets. Below is a list of best practices that nonprofits should consider before starting the budget process. For ASF, they know they have one donor that contributes a large amount in February, and another high-level donor in July.