The Benefits of Budgeting in Education

Budgeting is a financial estimation which is written on paper and which also predetermines execution. The benefits of budgeting in education are numerous as there is no way there could have been any effective analysis and establishment of structure without budget placement.

Creating a school budget is probably the single most labor-intensive project a school district’s business office undertakes every fiscal year. Boards of education, superintendents and administrative teams set all kinds of worthwhile educational goals for a district every year. This means none of the goals will be achieved if they aren’t definitively represented in the school’s budget by these sets of people in leadership.

As most states have their own statutory budget adoption deadlines that must be strictly adhered to, the school business officials also must ensure a budget calendar is developed that schedules input from all relevant programmes. This allows the developed budget to meet every required statutory deadline. The budget calendar no doubt serve as an index for tracking the budget development process.

Creating a budget allows a school to survey monthly expenses, and since loan funds are the only source of income for many established schools, a culture of budgeting will save money, minimize loan debt, and avoid unnecessary interest.

Also, budgeting allows students to analyze necessary expenses and plan for unexpected costs. A responsible borrower will limit unnecessary expenses and develop innovative ways to cut costs. These good sides of budgeting amongst others are the unflinching benefits of budgeting in education as necessary device to surviving in the deafening demands of the academic world.

One of the most labor-intensive projects for a school district is creating a school budget. The educational budget is not just a fiscal planning document, but it is a deliverable of the district’s promises to the community. Let us therefore check out some of the benefits of budgeting in education:

• Effective Implementation of Administrative Goals

Since educational planning is primarily concerned with formulating objectives for action, it would therefore be only logical to expect that the budgetary activity should play a major role in planning, programming and controlling educational costs during the planned period.

As a matter of fact* a draft plan is only a blueprint for action, whilst budgetary activity is mainly operational in nature«, This means that the budget should be so devised as to highlight the truly operational characteristics, both physical and financial, of any given programme.

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• Conversion of Ideas into Funds

Since a sound and reliable budgeting should always be converted into definite projects of construction and development (creation of new staff post, etc.). Each project having been costed carefully and the budget should be drawn on the basis of these items.

In this ways the budget can have a significant role to play in making available the funds necessary for actually achieving the targets. To a certain extent, this is what has happened with the present educational plan in Tanzania, although the large proportion of external aid expected in the financing of the plan has been a major cause of the difficulties found in reaching the targets.

Other Benefits of Budgeting in Schools are:

• Budgeting helps to ensure that we have correct estimates of revenue and expenditure.
• Budgeting help us to spend as budgeted, that is, expenditure will be as per the budget.
• Budgeting helps institutions to meet their objectives.
• Budgeting forms the basis of accounting and therefore institutions become more efficient.
• Budgeting makes it possible to provide equitable allocation of resources.
• Budgeting helps to determine the quality and quantity of services in the institution or in an organization.
• The budget itself confers authority to administrators or head teachers to collect and to spend money appropriately and effectively.
• The budget ensures economic use of resources and for the appropriate projects that are needful to be funded.
• Budgeting helps education institutions to achieve the purpose expected by the society.
• Budgeting also cautions administrators or head teacher against unrealistic optimisms. In other words it helps to check on the kind of decisions that are made by the administrators.
• A budget also forms the basis of future budgets. The plan of a budget will help to formulate and plan for the future budgets.
• The budget will help in coordinating different units and departments towards general goals of the school.