NP Budgeting is a free Google Sheets™ template and add-on designed to help small- to medium-sized nonprofits create annual, monthly, and program budgets and project cash flow.

Money is power. Decisions about how we spend our money as organizations have huge ripple effects, and often those decisions are in the hands of only a few members of the organization. As more organizations try to build transparent, accessible, and equitable ways to develop budgets, we quickly run into challenges because the tools are not built to be accessed by everyone. Complicated budget excel spreadsheets are often unintelligible to most staff, and more than one person editing a budget can quickly create multiple budget versions, confusing everyone and leading to even less understanding of where the money is going.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. We spent over a year developing a clean, extremely simple, and highly accessible budget template, which can be used in collaborative budgeting processes with ease. By building the template in Google Sheets™, everyone can access the budget and edit it in real time, making it easy for multiple people to interact with the budget in its stages of development.

You can use this template in any organization, no matter how you make decisions. We’ve successfully used it with a variety of nonprofits, from all-volunteer organizations to organizations with over twenty staff and multiple programs. It’s particularly useful in organizations where many folks interact with budgets.

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