Academic Budget Planning Factors Worksheet

November, 2016

I created the budget planning aid shown below in 2016. My intent was to stimulate internal stakeholders’ thinking about the factors that drive budgetary needs, and thus to avoid natural tendencies to incremental, haphazard budgeting. The worksheet prompts planners to consider a variety of factors under three broad headings:

  • Environmental Scan

  • Organizational Assessment

  • Analysis of Operations & Services

Environmental Scan

  • Opportunities to be seized

  • Threats to be mitigated

  • Societal, demographic, and technological trends

  • Enrollment projections/trends

  • Customer expectations to be met

  • Emerging or ratified standard (accreditation, professional association, industry)

  • Benchmarking

Organizational Assessment

  • Strengths to be enhanced

  • Weaknesses to be remedied

Analysis of Operations & Services

  • Decisions associated with end of cycle/contract

  • Maintenance needs associated with past purchases

  • Contracts to be migrated to new vendors

  • Resource surpluses or deficits to be corrected

  • Assets to be purchased/replaced

  • Services to be discontinued/downgraded/scaled back

  • Services to be added/upgraded/improved

  • In-house functions to be outsourced

  • Outsourced functions to be brought in house

Want to learn more about budget planning and related topics?

Click the buttons below to see relevant entries in my bibliography, SmithFile.