How Does Our Group Budget?

It is useful for groups to have an annual budget plan to keep track of money coming in and going out of your account.

The types of things that your group may need to budget for are:

ACTIVITIES

Your group will need to think about what type of regular activities your group will be doing over the coming year for members, and set your membership fee accordingly. We have great guidance on choosing the right price for your memberships: please see the "How Do We Decide On Our Membership Fees?" article for more information.

EQUIPMENT

Take some time to think about what (if any) equipment your group may have and may need replacing, or any new equipment that you may want to purchase throughout the year to achieve the aims and objectives of your group. The money for the equipment will need to come from somewhere: memberships, donations, grants or sponsorships. Some of the streams listed cannot be guaranteed until you are completing their respective processes, so it is worth covering essential and important equipment with your membership fees, and then other equipment with alternative streams of funding (if you are thinking of using those). 

Having an equipment log of what is stored, where is it stored and when it was purchased is a great way to keep track of this and makes a smoother handover process when the time comes. We'd recommend logging PAT testing dates to make sure your equipment is always safe to use.

ONE OFF EVENTS

When budgeting for events you will need to take a number of factors into account when setting ticket prices to make sure that the event does not run at a loss, these include:

• How much money is in your student group account, and can you afford to subsidise some of the costs to reduce the ticket price?
• How much will the event cost to run (making sure to take VAT into account. Please see the "How Does VAT Affect Our Group" article for more information on this)? 
• How many tickets will you sell? 

We recommend that for larger events (balls etc) that are costly, that you over budget by 10% as a contingency and make sure that you set your ticket prices to cover all costs. 

Our article [link coming soon] provides further information which can help you make sensible choices to keep your costings low as possible for events. 

For any issues relating to accessing the links above, please get in touch here.