The Types of Budgets Used By OpenUp

Our Common Budgets

1. Core Operating Budget

• covers a company’s known expenses and predicted future costs for a specific period of time (typically a quarter or a year).

• Historical costs and expenses are used as a basis to project the budget forward.

Most costs that fall under core operating overhead are fixed.

Variable costs figures are arrived at by getting the average of the past six months of expenditure.

$VC=TC(M1)+TC(M2)+TC(M3)+TC(M4)+TC(M5)+TC(M6)/6$

• Note: Traditional core operating budgets include predictions of what a business stands to earn (revenue, income, profit margins, income after tax. etc.) in a series of worst-to-best case scenarios.

• As a non-profit organization, it’s important to segregate and denote estimated streams of income flow, from temporary, transient sources of funding.

2. Revenue Project Budgets

• apply to any invoiced project.

• A template can be viewed here.

As a non-profit organization, it’s important to make the distinction between revenue projects, and non-revenue projects.

This budget is split into different costs:

• STAFF COSTS.

• • Internal staff; salaried, OpenUp team members.

  • Get costed in at a fixed internal day rate, per person.

  • • That’s a blanket rate of R4000 (four thousand rand) per day, per person.

• EXTERNAL RESOURCES.

• • Independent contractors outside of the company who bill for their services.

• HARD COSTS.

• tangible, easily quantifiable assets needed to complete the project.

• Where project managers can budget for what they expect to spend on software, printing, various travel costs, etc.

This is for revenue-generating projects. The onus is on the project managers to put together the budget.

3. Overall Budget for Internal Projects

• Internal projects don’t get invoiced; they get funded.

• Grants are split among internal projects.

What is the difference between an internal project and an external project? See here.