Tips for establishing and controlling your event budget
By nature, an event organizer thinks big. He dreams of finding a great place, inviting the best speakers, offering drinks and high quality food, and being generous to the participants!
However, your means are limited and you want to achieve satisfactory results.
It is for this reason that the event organizer should give a lot of attention to his budget planning.
Whether you have a position specifically assigned to budget planning or not, it is obvious that this is a very important and challenging responsibility!
That's why we will offer you tips to properly establish and respect your budget.
Calculation automation system
Le premier conseil que nous avons à vous donné pour concevoir un budget est de disposer d’un système d’automatisation des calculs. Un tel programme a plusieurs avantages.
First, it limits manual operations. These can be painful, take away valuable time and, most importantly, cause inevitable miscalculation.
In addition, it allows (if you consent to) some of your employees to manage information from their respective fields.
It makes everyone's life easier. The budget forecasts will be updated automatically according to sales, hires, expenses incurred and adjustments of each category.
Errors, oversights and surprises will inevitably become rare with a system of automation of budget calculations.
Joint work system
One of the keys to keeping a budget that we can really rely on is to involve all the budget items and the various people responsible in its design, particularly in its update.
Having a system that works together on the budget is a great asset in planning your event.
For each amount calculated in the budget, it becomes possible for the managers to note the elements that are specific to them. They will be able to add the detailed amounts they manage.
Several budget meetings that take away your time will be saved through such a system. You will also immediately know the additions of your employees.
Checklist of budget items
A budget must be planned and respected with rigor if we want to avoid unpleasant surprises.
In budget planning, all too often, we forget about expenses that then add to each other.
La meilleure façon d’éviter cette situation indésirable, c’est de se faire une liste des postes budgétaires qui pourraient être requis, puis de relire cette liste au fur et à mesure afin d’ouvrir de nouveaux postes, si nécessaire.
To do this, I recommend you first read our document in which are listed a hundred elements specific to the field of events that require fees.
What may seem like a minor detail is also included, as it is often the accumulation of neglected elements that unbalance a budget.
An aide-memoire of this kind is indispensable in the planning of events because we regularly modify budget posts during the process.
Examples of past budgets
It is extremely difficult to design a reliable event budget without having done one before, as many costs are difficult to assess. Even if this is not your first time, each event can vary a lot and budget planning needs to be adjusted.
No matter where you are personally, we recommend that for certain budget items, you rely on comparable historical data in order to realistically estimate the expected costs.
The goal is to be as reliable and precise as possible based on past experiences. At the same time, we recommend that you archive your budgets properly, in case they become useful again.
We hope these tips will help you design quality event budgets. These depend on rigorous planning, adaptability and teamwork.
They can also be greatly facilitated, as we have seen, by automating the calculations. Implement these recommendations and you will feel more in control of your budgets.
This avoids useless worries, especially in the organization of events, as we know they already have their share of surprises.
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Written by: Géraldine Saucier
