Budget and financial tracking skills appear in nearly every project advert, from assistant to coordinator. Donors and managers trust people who can show exactly where money is planned to go and where it went. You do not need to be an accountant, but you do need to build a clear budget and follow it.
How a project budget is built
A project budget is a table of cost lines. Each line has:
- Description: what the money is for, such as "Lunch for participants".
- Unit: what you are counting, such as person per day, trip or piece.
- Quantity: how many units.
- Unit cost: price of one unit in cedis.
- Total: quantity times unit cost.
Building costs from units makes your budget easy to check and easy to adjust. If the number of participants changes, you change one quantity and the totals update.
Group lines into categories, such as personnel, travel, meetings and training, equipment and supplies, and administration. Many donors give you their own categories; use them exactly.
A worked example
Fuseini asks Mariama to budget a two day training for ten water committee members. All prices here are invented for practice. She uses a spreadsheet with a formula in the total column, such as =C2*D2 to multiply quantity by unit cost.
| Cost line | Unit | Qty | Unit cost (GHS) | Total (GHS) | |---|---|---|---|---| | Lunch and snacks | person per day | 24 | 60 | 1,440 | | Transport refund | person per day | 20 | 30 | 600 | | Facilitator fee | day | 2 | 500 | 1,000 | | Venue hire | day | 2 | 300 | 600 | | Handouts and stationery | set | 12 | 25 | 300 | | | | | | | | Contingency | | | | 200 | | | | | | |