This includes camps, retreats, outings, mission trips, and special days. This includes everything it takes to make a great program every week. You don’t want to write everything yourself. Postage, pens, paper clips, and printing aren’t free. Your budget needs to have these 10 categories: That’s overkill, and it creates the need to constantly shift funds around to accommodate overspending on one thing and underspending on another.ġ0 Categories Every Youth Ministry Should Have I’ve also seen ministry budgets that try to itemize every little thing. That’s not helpful for figuring out how much will be spent on what and when. I’ve seen ministry budgets that only list one lump sum of money to be spent during the year. This is much easier to do when the budget is divided into clear categories, with accurate estimates for how much money will be spent each month. You want to take a hard look at the current budget to make sure you’re getting as much return on investment as you can. If you say you value something, make sure it’s reflected in your budget. It’s often said that you can know what a person values by looking at how he spends his money. It allows you to predetermine when and how your ministry money will be spent. However, preparing a good budget helps you make the most of the resources you have. You didn’t get into ministry to crunch a bunch of numbers and track dollars and cents. You didn’t get into ministry to crunch numbers and track dollars and cents, but preparing a good budget will help you make the most of the resources you have. You’ll be on the fast-track to creating the Ultimate Youth Ministry Budget. Not a subscriber? Get access to research, reports, trends, and more by subscribing to Leadership Network Advance here.You just need to use a calendar and the categories I give you in this post. If I can help address your questions, feel free to drop me a line at article was originally posted in Leadership Network Advance. Also on that page you can learn about our other reports to help your church set compensation at appropriate levels for your team. You can get the FREE overarching report “Seven Vital Benchmarks in Church Compensation” at /salary. But we get asked this question a lot and did want to provide some insight to your questions. In my next post I will state why I think focusing on these figures is a little misleading on the whole anyway. To make matters more interesting the church leadership continues to believe and proclaim that they spend no more than 50%. Their actual percentage which makes their actual percentage closer to the 56% range. For instance, let’s say they set all compensation at $2,000,000 making their staffing percentage 50%.īut then reality hits and that year their income was closer to $3,600,000 instead of the goal of $ 4M. They then add up all the staffing costs and compare that to the total. For example, the church may have a stated goal BUDGET income of $4,000,000 for the coming year. They look at what they set as a congregationally approved BUDGET of income and expenses instead of actual. In my experience, some churches look at this in a different way. We attempted in the way we specifically asked questions this time around to get the TOTAL of all dollars that go to supporting staff in the church.įourth, the report asked for staff members: “What do you pay them all in?” (or we computed with benefit ratios for those that did not.) We then asked the previous year’s actual 12 month income to compute the figure. Third, the challenge for many churches is they look at total staffing costs = salaries (and perhaps housing), and don’t include other compensation costs such as insurances and other benefits. There are slight adjustments at churches that are very large, but very little. So, for example, the 50th percentile at a church 3000-3999 in attendance is 53%, while the 50th percentile for churches 500-1000 is also right 52% for US churches. A few size ranges are higher, and a few are lower. Second, notice that across all the church sizes the figure is remarkably consistent at around that number. We also provide percentiles for these percentages by church size in the free report. Averages are only one guide when looking at these types of issues. Previous readers of my posts know that averages generally deceive you because causal readers assign them to be normative. Note below for the challenge that creates for some churches. The figure is the total percentage of all dollars expended divided by the total income of the church. In this post I want to elaborate on several Frequently Asked Questions I get in this regard.įirst, the overall average was 52% across the 1000 plus churches that responded to the survey. In our most recent FREE report “Seven Vital Benchmarks in Church Compensation” (available at this link), the second finding deals with the percentage of church budget that goes to staffing.
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