What is your strategy for creating a sustainable budget?

That's rightly put. We call it a Comprehensive (Post NBA) Assessment that follows your Need based Analysis. One important factor in the entire Project is to be realistic and factual regarding all the inputs. It's nice to be ambitious but its wise to be cautious.

How variable your cost is needs to be viewed as a spectrum. For example, on the issue of fixed costs, you might consider looking at ways to make them more flexible, especially if the overhead you receive from your donors is not fixed but a percentage of their total grant. If I take the example of the rent: if fixed, it will stay the same, irrespective of the number of your staff. But the overhead financing that budget line might evolve based on the number of staff your grants cover.

It is very important to study how these costs behave in your company. Most of the time, benchmarking the competition (meaning, the market) is a good approach, but never forget to adjust your cost structure according to how you want the costs to behave. Not knowing how they influence the overall budget, will lead to bad decisions.

Investment is key! Knowing the difference between an expense and investment will help identify better sources of income. An example of this is marketing. Having a marketing budget, without ROI expectations is not investment, it's just spending money without return. Also, know what brings money to the company! There are situations when profitability comes from unexpected areas of the company. This may mean you need to adjust your budget to feed the profitable part of your company.

Scenario planning is one of the main components of a profitable business. This is the very first part of creating a company - knowing what happens when you don't get 100% of the resources you need. If scenario planning is new to you, do the following: 1. What would happen if you'd only get 50% of the resources for you business? What'd be the expected revenue? 2. What would happen if you only get 75% of the resources for you business? What is the expected revenue? 3. What would happen if you'd get 100% of the resources for you business? What is the expected revenue? 4. What are the risks and opportunities of these 3 scenarios?

Geralmente as pessoas têm dificuldade de olhar a própria situa??o financeira, conseguem no máximo organizar as contas do mês e o resultado costuma ser falta de prioriza??o e falha na realiza??o dos desejos. Por isso é importante trazer a quest?o dos múltiplos cenários, pois apenas quando conseguimos sair do básico do or?amento mensal e tra?amos estratégias diferentes pra cenários diversos, é que se é possível fazer um planejamento financeiro eficaz. Na minha análise de risco, considero tudo que pode acontecer e atrapalhar o plano do meu cliente, como desemprego, uma doen?a na família, acidentes, golpes, dívidas, problemas com dependentes financeiros, desistência de um plano, etc, e assim projeto cenários possíveis e seguros.

I recommend to plan scenarios in different time frames. It's useful to see better the uncertainties in the long term. By choosing couple of key variables, you can quite easily make reasonable scenarios.

The best way to learn and improve? Spend the money. You can't learn where to put resources if you don't use the resources you have. This inevitably involves risk, but if you're too tight with funds, you may miss out on big rewards.

Remember to update your scenarios on a regular basis. Things can change rapidly or radically even in the short term and scenario planning is really useful tool to keep your outlook up to date.