We strongly reccomend student groups complete a budget form as part of the annual summer admin process. This is an incredibly important exercise for Treasurers to complete to help you understand what your costs are, what your income therefore needs to be and it helps you set your membership price.
Where do we find it?
The budget form will be shared with your group’s google drive by the 30th June. So all you will need to do is head to the ‘Shared With Me’ section and find the file called ‘Group Finance Sheet 23/24’.
What is the deadline to complete it by?
The deadline to complete the form is 13 August. It’s really important you meet this deadline as otherwise you won’t have a membership live in time for the start of term.
Do we need to email it to you?
No! You don’t need to worry about sending the form back to us - we can see what forms have been filled out and what haven’t, so all you need to do is fill it out!
Who needs to complete the budget form?
Filling out the form should be a task that you do as a whole committee, but should be led by your Treasurer with support of your President.
Can we ask you for help?
Absolutely! There’s a guidance notes tab on the budget form itself, so have a read through there first to see if that answers your questions. If not, submit us a ticket on Freshdesk or email studentopportunities@su.rhul.ac.uk
Expenditure
For the expenditure section of your budget form you should consider your plans for the year. There will be some things you might not be sure of the price on - so just put an educated guess, and you might not have all of your costs outlined for the year yet, and that’s absolutely fine too! This is just to help give you and us an idea of what costs you might have coming up, and whether your memberships are reflective of that.
Some things to consider for this section:
Coaches or instructors
If you need to purchase any new equipment - although make sure to consider what equipment you have already!
Kit that will be owned by your group
Travel to/from competitions or opportunities
Any events that you’re planning on running
Any software or subscriptions you might have
Facility hire
Income
You don’t need to add your current balance - this will appear automatically and will be included in the calculations for your predicted leftover balance.
You also don’t need to manually add the income for your memberships - once you put in your price and estimated members this will automatically be included in your overall predicted income.
When estimating membership numbers for the upcoming year, don’t worry about being exact - we completely understand that we don’t know exactly what next year will look like, so a rough guess or a middle ground between previous years would be fine!
Other income to consider is whether you will do any fundraising or sponsorships. If you put the expenditure for the event on there - is there also any related income that should be included i.e. ticket sales.
In the income section, you will also need to set your memberships. More guidance on this is available on this Freshdesk article.
Predicted Leftover Balance
Once you’ve filled out your planned income and expenditure, the table on the right will show your predicted leftover balance. This is calculated as below and should not be predicting a deficit.
You should aim to at least cover your costs, so if you are predicting a minus, then you need to think about reducing your expenditure or increasing memberships or other income revenues such as sponsorships.
If you started in debt, due to a historical deficit on the account, then just make sure your planned income covers your planned expenditure, and we will support you with a plan to reduce the debt in the account.