Since you're opening a new school, I assume your parent group is new, too. I suggest your officers sit down and start by examining your parent group's goals and assign % of effort to each goal. Then you can assign the same percentages, more or less, to the amount of money you project your group will raise next year. That's your preliminary budget. After you start raising money, you can adjust the budgets if your actual $ raised is more/less than projected. This approach is a bit more scientific than just guessing.
For example....
Let's say you have three main goals (or components to your mission): increase parent involvement, enrich the educational experience, and supplement the physical classroom. And your board agrees to assign the following percentages for the amount of effort and funds for each:
parent involvement 40%
enrichement 35%
classrooms 25%
Now sit down and project how much money you think you'll earn in your fundraising. Do it as scientifically as you can and your #s will be "better" and more reliable. For example, a typical catalog fundraiser might see 45% particiaption, at $50 profit per participant (my numbers, not industry standards). Thinking this way, you can estimate how much you might raise from a typical catalog fundraiser. It's a good idea to call a couple of PTOs in your community and ask for their help estimating fundraising success. If that sounds like too much work, then just take a wild guess, but at least think about how much money your wild guess would be "per family" so you can be sure it passes the reasonableness test.
Let's say you estimate you'll be able to raise $10,000 next year. Then that's your net income budget. Apply your percentages and get your overall Expense budget:
parent involvement $4,000
enrichment $3,500
classroom $2,500
Now you can break down each of your expense categories into planned activities such as:
parent involvement
- Movie Nights (2) $500
- Donuts With Dad (1) $250
- Muffins with Mom (1) $250
- Welcome Picnic $1,000
- School directory $500
- Unallocated $1,500
enrichment
- Assemblies $2,000
- field trips $1,000
- Character awards $500
classroom
- $x per classroom $xxxxx
This is a very tight budget plan, and doesn't allow for unexpected activities or contingency. Ok, so tweak it until it feels right. You should also consider including expenses for staff & volunteer appreication, and PTO operations like paper or copying.
If your PTO is a PTOToday plus member, you can see a sample budget on the Bonus Tools page of this website. There are also articles about budgeting (available to anyone) in the article archive on this site, too.
Jeez...guess you hit my hot button [img]smile.gif[/img]
