Creating A Budget

Over the past few months, I've worked with employees and vendors of the Alliance Library System to create a budget for our next fiscal year. Last week, I presented it to the board of directors at ALS and it was approved.

As libraries, we tend to know in advance roughly how much money will be coming in...whether it comes from grants, property tax revenues, our parent organization, etc. The challenge, then, comes in fulfilling the mission and goals of our libraries within these incoming dollars.

There are two main types of budgeting:
(1) Zero-based budgeting, where you start from scratch every year and justify every expense that ends up in your budget.
(2) Incremental budgeting, where you start with either last year's results or last year's budget and add a certain amount or percent to each line item.

Here at ALS, we completed our budget using a combination of the two methods. We used incremental budgeting to determine our personnel expenses and we used zero-based budgeting to determine the non-personnel expenses.

If you're a member library of ALS and would like tips, pointers or help during your budgeting process, contact me or one of our Library Development Consultants. You can find our contact information here.