Budgeting & Forecasting

A budget is your plan for the year ahead in dollars: what you expect to bring in, what you expect to spend, and what that leaves you. A forecast is the same picture updated through the year as the real numbers come in.

There is no single right way to build a budget but the approach and supporting resources below provide a practical, repeatable way to budget and forecast for local public media orgnanizations, including small stations. It works best as a collaborative process, drawing input from staff across the station and from your board or finance committee rather than being built in isolation by one person.

---

Start from what actually happened.

Build on actuals

It's helpful to start with the past two years of your own historical results and budget forward from there, line by line, adjusting for what you know is changing. Grounding the plan in real numbers can help simplify the process and also produce a budget that's easier to explain to a board or a funder than a budget built from a blank page.

Treat it as a living document.

Stay current

A budget is a starting estimate, not a fixed truth. The template below is built to be returned to - comparing your plan against actuals and updating the forecast so that your view of the future stays current. Reviewing it regularly also lets you give your board or licensee a current, forward-looking picture and surface concerns early.

Plan for more than one outcome.

Scenarios

A sound budget is conservative and realistic about revenue and also builds in cost contingencies. Rather than committing to a single set of assumptions, the template below lets you build three scenarios side by side: a base case for your best estimate, an optimistic case, and a conservative case for a year where key revenue falls short.

Mind the cash, not just the budget.

Liquidity

A balanced annual budget can still leave you short in a given month. The template tracks cash quarter by quarter and estimates how many months of operating expenses your cash, investments, and credit could cover if revenue stopped.

---

Tools you can use

To help stations put budgeting and forecasting into practice, the Public Media Bridge Fund developed two hands-on resources for all stations to use:

Budget and Forecast Template

Excel template

A ready-to-use Excel workbook designed exclusively for public media organizations. You enter your numbers in one place and the rest of the workbook builds itself: a five-year view of revenue and expenses, a revenue-mix breakdown, a side-by-side comparison of scenarios, and a liquidity monitor that flags when projected cash coverage falls below one month. A detailed user guide and a quick-start checklist are built into the workbook, and it is designed to be reused year after year.

Download and use the template

Video walkthrough

Video: About 7 mins

A short recorded walk through of the Excel template: how to enter your numbers, what each tab does, and how to read the results.

Watch the walkthrough

Staff training guide

PDF: Step-by-step guide

A detailed, written walkthrough of the workbook. It also includes a quick-start checklist and answers to common questions.

Read the guide

---

---