This is the first in a series of posts for non-profit organizations that focus on how better budgeting can lead to better planning and decision making for payroll expense planning. Non profit organizations largest expense is people, so not surprisingly it tends to be the central focus of the planning process and the most challenging to budget. If you have a payroll tool you can certainly load the resulting expenses into your budget. But as good as 
payroll tools are for employees currently hired they don’t offer much for modeling future hires. The payroll expenses is not only driven by the headcount, hourly wages, and planned hours, but also the many related expenses. Excel and other formula heavy models estimate the expenses with percentages over the months. The fact is taxes like Federal and State Unemployment have caps. Other expenses like healthcare are flat charges not percentage. Healthcare and 401Ks often have delayed starts. Employees don’t always start on the first of the month and leave on the last day. So formula tools estimate and overstate all types of payroll expenses. Budget Maestro lets you calculate the taxes in the right month, caps the expenses, and calculates the payroll expenses right down to the day.
For many of non profit clients managing planned new hires and this resulting cascade of related expenses off of their start date is a crucial part of the planning process for meeting the organizations goals and growing new service areas. With spreadsheets, the shifting time aspects of the budget is extremely cumbersome. Just think of a time where you took the budget to a planning meeting only to find out some key initiative impacting hundreds of activities needed to push back 6-9 months. So being able to layer in the new start dates can be a game changer, giving you timely access to new models that previous would have taken days to complete.
We put together a 15 minutes video to show you how Budget Maestro helps Non Profit companies glide through the budget including payroll, as well as revenue, expenses, and even the cash impact of the planning initiatives.
