Pudget Calculator

Working weeks per year turns an hourly rate into an annual cost. 52 covers the whole year. Drop it to 48 or 50 if you want paid time off excluded from what people can actually deliver. It applies to everyone.

We call our work renames one word throughout — use Programs, Services, Products, Departments, Clients, or type your own. It changes labels only, never the arithmetic.

Employer costs % is what you pay on top of wages — CPP, EI, WCB and vacation pay. In BC that is commonly 10–14%. Budgets that leave it out come up short at year end, which is why it is here by default. Set it to 0 if everyone is a contractor, or override it for one person in step 4.

This is the one thing worth understanding. Programs and projects have no figures of their own — you never type a number here. Every total is worked out from the costs and the staff time you attach to them.

Each one is in one of two modes, shown by the tag beside its name:

• one unit — no projects. Costs, staff time and outcomes attach to it directly.
• by project — it vanishes from every dropdown and from the staff grid. Only its projects can be chosen, and the program row becomes the sum of them.

So the same money can never be counted twice. If you add a project to something that already carries figures, the tool stops and asks what to do with them.

Overhead has its own step below — put your accountant, bank fees and insurance against it.

Non-wage spending that belongs to a particular line of work. Venue hire, printing, advertising, catering, equipment. Staff cost comes from step 5 — do not enter it here or it will be counted twice, and anything organization-wide belongs in step 4.

Money spent raising money does not belong here — sponsor pitches, appeal mailings, a donor database, the cost of a fundraising event. That is true even when the money is being raised for one specific line of work, because the category follows what the activity is, not who benefits from it. Turn on the fundraising category in step 4 and put it there.

Set Per to Month and the tool multiplies by 12; the Annual column shows the result immediately. Add as many lines as you like against the same project — "print", "venue" and "catering" as three lines is easier to defend to a funder than one lump.

A negative amount is allowed, and is a neat way to record income that offsets a specific cost, such as a sponsorship covering a venue.

Overhead sits on its own. It carries no outcomes and never appears in the main table. It is reported separately, with an overhead rate — the share of your whole budget that is indirect. Funders ask for that number; many have a ceiling on it.

Staff can be allocated here too. In step 5 you will see an Overhead box kept apart from the rest — put the share of someone's time that goes on governance, bookkeeping, board support or general admin there. Program hours and overhead hours stay separate all the way through, but still add to 100% for each person, because that is their whole working week.

Bringing money in is not overhead either. Fundraising, appeals and business development are a third thing, and charities have to report them separately from both delivery and administration. Switch on the fundraising category below and they get their own bucket, their own rate, and a cost-per-dollar-raised figure.

Rename the section if your organization calls it something else — core costs, indirect, central services.

What a person costs: hourly rate × hours a week × working weeks, plus employer costs. The figure on the right of each card is the real annual cost of employing them.

The allocation must total 100%. This is not how busy someone is — it is how their whole cost gets divided across the work. Somebody at 100% of a 10-hour week is fully allocated. The badge turns green at 100% and red otherwise, and the breakdown tells you exactly how many dollars are stranded or double-counted.

Switch between % and Hours / week freely — figures convert both ways, nothing is lost. Use hours if that is how your team thinks; use Split evenly as a starting point and adjust.

The Overhead box sits below a divider, apart from the rest. Put the share of someone's week that goes on bookkeeping, governance, board support or general admin there — it still counts toward their 100%, but it is reported as indirect rather than as program delivery.

With the fundraising category switched on in step 4, a second box appears beside it. Put the hours someone spends asking for money there — pitching sponsors, writing appeals, stewarding donors — even when they are raising it for one particular line of work. A coordinator who runs a program and also chases its sponsorship is split across two boxes, and that is the point: it is the only way to see what raising the money actually costs.

For a contractor, set their Employer % to 0. For volunteers, either leave them out or enter a notional rate to show donated value — but remember it will then appear in your budget total.

Optional, and the most useful thing in the tool. A budget says what you will spend. An outcome says what that buys, and the two together give you a cost per participant, per unit, per hour delivered — the number funders and boards ask for.

Describe the unit in the first column ("participants", "meals served", "units sold"), then the quantity and how often. Times / yr is left blank for something that runs all year; set it to the number of sessions if it does not. So "10 participants a week" for a 30-week programme is 10, per week, 30 times — 300 a year.

One caution: if a project carries several outcomes, each one divides the same budget a different way. They are alternative views of the same money, not costs to be added up.

Applies to is usually one line of work, but an outcome can also apply to Whole organization (all ${uP()}) — useful for a figure that cuts across everything, like total people served. That divides the cost of all program & project work combined, not any one program's.

Overhead and fundraising have no outcomes — they are the cost of keeping the doors open and of bringing money in, not of delivering something — so neither appears in the list here.

Give each line of work one core outcome. That is the single figure the budget should be judged against, and the only one that gets a cost per unit. Anything else you track — new versus returning, conversions, media reach — stays recorded as an operational measure without a cost per unit, because several outcomes dividing one budget produce several different unit costs for the same money and none of them can be quoted safely.

Entirely optional. With nothing entered, no surplus, shortfall or funding language appears anywhere — the breakdown stays a pure cost budget.

Each line says what the money is for:

• A specific line of work — a grant, a client fee, sponsorship, ticket or product income. It offsets that line's cost and shows you what is still to raise.
• Overhead — core funding, an operating grant.
• General / untied — money not attached to anything in particular: general donations, membership, reserves, retained profit. It is not attributed to any one line, because deciding where it lands is your call, not the tool's.

The breakdown then shows a balance per line and a bottom line for the whole organization. A line showing a shortfall is not an error — it is the gap you are fundraising against.

Why one name. A budget shows what work costs. It does not show who answers for it. Naming one lead per line of work turns the budget into something you can actually run the year from, and it is the first thing a board or a funder asks when a number looks wrong.

The list is built from the people in step 5, so add someone there first. Leaving a lead blank is allowed — the count above the table tells you how many are still unassigned.

The note is free text and goes in the printed report: use it for a co-lead, a hand-over date, a caveat, or anything the next reader of this budget would want to know.