pack budgets

[lynncc]

how do other packs plan their annual budgets. Any examples out there beyond the basic, rechartering, boyslife, insurance etc...thanks

[ScoutNut]

Well I guess we are kind of eye-ballers & and not hard & fast budgeters.

 

We know what we usually spend on Pack meetings & activites. We know when we have taken an increased cost on an activity & weather it was a one time only thing or will be a consistent cost. We look at what we ended the past year & the previous year with in the bank. We look at if we expect our activites to be about the same as the past year or if we are adding new things or an expensive thing. We see how many new boys we have added & how many we have lost. Then, when we have sifted all of this together, we decide if we want to raise the per boy popcorn goal or keep it the same (we never lower it).

 

Our overall goal is to have the Pack provide as much as possible for the Scout and keep the out-of-pocket cost to the families minimal.

 

[5570xr2]

take a look at the Ideal Year of Scouting planner for some ideas-

 

http://www.trails-end.com/TEPublic/docs/4800IYOS.pdf

 

The planner is a good tool whether you sell popcorn or not.

 

MC

[dsteele]

5570 beat me to the punch. The Trail's End Ideal Year of Scouting site has an excellent budgeting tool for unit use.

 

For a non-electonic guide, check out The Unit Budget Plan, a paper version available from your council service center. This is also a good tool to use as a guideline for planning your pack's budget.

 

I'm kinda partial to the Trail's End site -- it's free and easily distributed to the families in your unit.

 

Unc.

[Eamonn]

Hi,

While a couple of years back both the District and the Council did introduce the Trails End planner to our members. I have to admit that we never used it.

I think that it is important that everyone understands that there is no free ride or free lunch. Each and every cent that is spent has to come from somewhere.

We used to have our annual pack planning meeting, this was the only meeting of the year where both the program guys and the support guys all met at the same time in the same room. It was also the only meeting of the year that was allowed to go over 90 minutes!!

The first big question was "What do we want to do?" We looked at themes and made changes as we felt were necessary or seemed to fit in better with us. We looked at District and Council activities as well as things that were happening in our community.

In our case I felt very strongly that we ought to support the District and District activities.

When we knew what we wanted to do we moved on to "How are we going to pay for it? And what is it going to cost?"

Some activities were put into the budget. We included Day Camp and the District Cub Scouts Olympics, this added $30.00 to money that we needed to get. Some pack activities were not in the budget, things like attending a baseball game. We knew that the pack was going and knew that the tickets cost whatever, but we didn't include them in the budget.

We looked at how much things were going to cost. Would the B & G be a covered dish or would we have it catered? If we changed themes and had a Fishing theme and a pack fishing derby would we award prizes and how much would they cost?

Next we looked at the total amount of money needed per Cub Scout. At that time it worked out to be about $125 -$160 per boy.

Some parents had said that they didn't want to participate in any fund raising. We were chartered by our local Catholic church and many of the boys attended the Catholic school, which did a lot of fund raising. Some parents wanted to raise money. We looked at 3 or 4 fund raising events a year, one of which was the Popcorn sale.

The deal was that each parent was responsible for somehow, someway coming up with the amount of money needed to pay for their Son's participation in the activities of the pack. They could write a check for the full amount or participate in the fund raising events or do a combination of both. As long as they came up with the money that was fine with the pack committee. The pack committee dealt with any cases of hardship and with families that had more than one son in the program.

At times membership did make a difference to our budget. If we had 50 boys when we did the budget and say we had budgeted $50 for fishing prizes and then the pack grew to 75 boys, we didn't change the $50 amount. Still the $1.00 per boy had gone down to 67 cents and we were ahead of the game plan!! If some Lads didn't participate in budgeted activities we also made out.

We didn't include the cost of resident Cub Scout Camp in our budget, but some parents used the fund raising opportunities offered to raise the money needed to send their Lads to camp.

Some Leaders thought that having things like Day camp and District activities in the budget was not right, but my feeling is that as Cub Scouts and as part of the District we needed to participate in Cub Scout and District activities. I was more concerned about the program than trying to keep out of pocket expenses down.

At the risk of blowing my own trumpet it really worked, people seen the Cub Scouts from pack 155 active and doing things and they wanted to be part of this winning team, they really wanted to see their son in a pack that was going somewhere. In less than 3 years we seen the pack grow from under 25 Cub Scouts to 70. The pack gave birth to a Troop and many of the parents who seen how things worked when they were involved in Cub Scouting now see that the system works in the Troop.

Eamonn