Making plans before executing a project is one thing that has saved many projects from crashing. No doubt, plans are needed for projects to be carried out, but the question is how these plans come into existence.
One way is through a budget proposal! While a budget proposal is essential, one must exercise caution, such that the proposal must be well-curated.
Think about it; it is supposed to set out plans and convince relevant stakeholders that you understand what you are doing and that your plan is worthy of being funded. Anything short of these might fail the proposal and the budget itself. Therefore, it is essential to understand how best to curate one.
Hence, this article explains why you need a budget proposal, the steps necessary to create one, and the templates you can use.
Why Do You Need it?
Without a budget proposal template, you would have to start outlining your interrelated and individual budgets from scratch, which causes delays and would not afford you enough time to carry out the proposal’s feasibility. Therefore, having a template is recommended.
With it, you can quickly use the prefilled template to draw up your proposal and understand where your expenses and revenue stand. Also, you will easily compare the differences in your budget and actual amounts and use it to estimate projected budget amounts for line items like equipment, professional service, travel expenses, and many others.
Steps to Create it
Creating a budget may not be as easy as it sounds, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be complicated. Below, you will find a guide that will take you through the step-by-step process of creating one. Some essential steps should be carried out to make a successful proposal.
These steps involve the following:
Add person-days per company
In carefully estimating the cost of a project, you must factor in each person’s role and the amount of work required of them for each activity needed to be done. This is important since each role may require different professionals to carry out a task, and in doing this, they will charge different rates. This will also help determine who is involved with what and how much time they must give into achieving it.
Estimate labor cost
After adding the person-days per company, you must place each person against their role and hourly rate. This will allow you to know what each person’s engagement will cost and how best you can reduce or increase the estimated amount according to their duration and effort put into the project. You can get this by multiplying the hourly or daily rate by the hours or days they will be working.
Include other expenses
There are always different expenses involved for each project to be carried out. While the primary ones might have been covered, it is equally essential that the other expenses are not ignored, especially since they are incidental to the smooth operation of the personnel involved.
Some of these other expenses include:
- Salaries: Since labor will be employed, they must get financial rewards for their efforts in salaries. Therefore, their salary should appear as a methodological account of anticipated labor-related expenses. This may include insurance, benefits, bonuses, etc.
- Equipment costs: Here, you put down the projected amount spent on equipment. For instance, the costs of computers, servers, websites, copiers, etc.
- Professional services: Aside from those intricately tied to the project, there may still be a need for other professional service personnel. For instance, the service of a lawyer, bookkeeper, insurer, or trainer may be needed, and these will also need to be included.
- Professional memberships: The employees likely belong to any professional organization or the other, and this might require professional membership fees. Therefore, this segment is used to estimate what it will cost.
- Office space: No matter how small you think a project is, there are chances that you will need office space. This segment is used to estimate how much getting its occupancy will cost. It also includes things necessary to make the space habitable. For instance, the cost of electricity, water, security, internet, office supplies, etc.
- Telephone, internet, and travel: Communication is needed during a project. This section is used to detail how much this will require. Also, travel-related costs and the costs of other things like lodging, transportation, and meals during travel are included here.
- Sales and marketing costs: There might be a need to promote the project or the organization involved. This will involve making some marketing or sales expenses. For these costs, this section is used to document them.
- Subcontracting fee: If any task or mini project is to be subcontracted, this segment estimates the cost as the subcontracting fee. These expenses help you ensure that the budget captures everything, from the necessities to the incidentals. This is the only way you can gain a good insight into how much the overall project will cost and be able to defend it before the stakeholders who need some conviction to fund the budget.
Budget Proposal Templates
You might have understood the importance of a budget proposal template and the things that are necessary to be included but drawing it up may pose a challenge. In addition, drawing it up from scratch may consume a lot of time. So, this website has provided you with free downloadable templates to ease your burden. Rather than crafting these budget proposal templates from this website, you can download them from scratch. These budget proposal templates are also customizable so that you can customize them according to your needs.
Types of Budget Proposal Templates
It is also essential to know the types of budget proposal templates. Five basic types of templates that you will need when drawing up a budget are discussed below:
Project proposal budget template
This template helps you manage and fine-tune your individual and interrelated budgets so that relevant stakeholders can access the correct financial details. With this type of template, you can ensure that your proposed project budget calculations accurately capture material, labor, and fixed costs. This template also helps you monitor the difference between your proposed and actual budget amounts.
Annual budget proposal template
This template allows you to track your proposed budget and actual funding well. This template usually contains a 12-months column to fill for each month of the year. In this template, you must enter anticipated revenues, sales, cost of goods, labor costs, marketing costs, general and admin expenses, and earnings before interest and taxes. It is also essential to consider entering anticipated cash, inventory, accounts, and other time-sensitive expenses.
Research proposal budget template
This template allows you to quickly present an itemized list of expected budget costs. In addition, this template includes a breakdown of proposed expenses and their effect on your potentially available funding. To present a reliable research proposal budget, it can quickly highlight wages and salaries, supplies, potential travel costs, equipment, and other essential costs.
Grant proposal budget template
You can use this template to account for each item stated in the proposal. The way it works is that you will input unique funding revenue ID numbers and itemized budget details into the template, and the proposed budget totals will be automatically calculated. There are also yearly columns that provide you with a long-term picture of your grant funding requests. This also allows you to track different contributors’ endowments.
Budget increase proposal template
With this unique budget template used to compare the current budget against the proposed budget, you can quantify a subjected budget increase. This helps you to put forward accurate over or under amounts. You have to input line-by-line costs, and a subtotal will be automatically calculated. It will also help you calculate a proposed budget amount increase. With this budget proposal template, you can also include information about different projects, including labor, materials, and fixed costs.
All the templates that have been provided above make proposals easy and quick for you if you need one to convince the relevant stakeholders to fund the project.
Final Thoughts
Budget proposals are vital if one is to present and convince relevant stakeholders to fund the project adequately. However, while the importance is not in much dispute, quickly coming up with one of these proposals may sometimes be challenging. Therefore, to make things easier, the budget proposal templates have been provided to guide you through a seamless exercise of quickly drawing up one for your project.
