Assignment Content
The purpose of this assignment is to provide you an opportunity to build a sample departmental or unit budget. At a director level or higher within a college or university, leaders participate in budget planning; this assignment will provide some first-hand experience related to one form of budget planning to help you understand some of the steps that go into budget planning. While zero-based budgeting is not often used because of time and other factors, it is very helpful in understanding the basics of budgets and how they work.
Imagine you are a College or University department head (e.g. Marketing, Registrar, Tutoring Services, Disability Services, etc.) Fill in the Excel spreadsheet provided with the services or resources you need to manage your department/unit for the year. You decide on the amount you need for each item, but you cannot exceed $200,000. No more than $75,000 may be used toward a single salary. The remaining funds can be allocated for other items your unit needs (e.g. staff development and training, software licenses, computers/printers, furniture, supplies, etc.). Since this exercise is to help you understand the basics of budget planning for higher education and amounts would vary greatly from institution to institution, feel free to use arbitrary numbers for each budget item.
Examples of Revenues:
Ticket Sales
Fees (e.g. application fee, technology fee, etc.)
Residential Housing Payments
On your spreadsheet, these can be described briefly with a few words.
Examples of Expenses:
Diploma Covers
Postage/Mailing
Booklet Printing
Salaries
Ads
Licenses
Travel
On your spreadsheet, these can be written as one or two words, as shown above.
Be sure your spreadsheet includes a minimum of one staff member’s salary and seven budget items. There should be a dollar amount for each resource and there should be a total for “Revenues” and a total for “Expenses”.
er Education Institution Name: Ershel Williams
