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Introduction to creating a Project budget

To create a budget for your project, you do five things:

First, you create budget resources (budget resource: A budget resource captures the maximum capacity for a project to consume money, work, or material units for a project. Budgets can only be applied at the project level by assigning a budget resource to the project summary task.) that represent the overall budget for the project, including budget resources for costs, work, and materials.
Second, you assign the budget resources to the project summary task. In this way, budgets are applied to the entire project.
Third, you enter values for the budget resources.
Fourth, you identify the other resources in your project that you want to track and measure against the overall budget resources. You identify the resources by grouping all of them (including the budget resources) according to the budget type that they are being measured against.
Finally, after you have categorized all resources according to the type of budget they belong to, you group the resources to view how they compare to the overall budget that was set up for the project.

What resources are required (Budget)?

Finally, we need to identify the resources needed to carry out these activities. This will shape the budget for the project. Often this will be done in conjunction with project partners.

All the planning can be expressed in the form of a financial plan or budget. Items which may appear in the expenditure section of the budget include:

Salaries

Training

Materials

Equipment

Transport

Rent

Evaluation

The budget should be prepared in a way that:

distinguishes between capital or investment costs (eg vehicles, computers) and recurring operational costs (eg salaries, travel costs).
This will be especially important if a partner will be continuing an activity after Organization involvement ends;
the amounts are itemised in detail and broken down by years and (in the case of joint funding with other donors) the Organization component should be clear;
it can be sent on to potential donors;
subsequent accounts will relate clearly back to the original budget. This is likely to be expected by a donor and should be borne in mind when laying it out.

See also