Preparing Your Pack Budget

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0:27OK, here we go. Good afternoon everybody. We are so glad to be here on today's Cub Chat Live talking about actually some really cool administrative support to make the rest of the year fun. Before we dig into that, we're going to say hello to some of our friends who have commented. Rich hair 956. Hello from it slid on me. There we go. Hello from pack 151 Scottdale, PA Rusty made it in. Hello from pack 84 in New Philadelphia. OH, we're so glad you're here.

1:00Oh my gosh. Fabian NEC 6190 pack two O 6 is in the house. Welcome. Hello from pack 1597 from Northeast Georgia council. I love this boiler bile budgets the fun stuff of cub scouts but actually it makes the fun possible. I am right right there with you. I was a clarinet performance major in college. I can count to 4 as many times as you need, but the budgets make the the resources possible to do an amazing program. We're so excited. Douglas Stark 1767 Happy Friday Woot woot pack 3310 out of Akron, OH Alexander Hold good to see you again.

1:37Happy Friday from Cub Scouts pack 220. Let's sum at the three Charles District Heart of America Council. We're so glad you're here. Tamra Christensen Hi, Kate and Daniel from Saint Martin, so excited for today's show. Yes, we're making things possible. Scouter Craig, 3256 Hello, all from Pack 3256 in Kent, Ohio. The Midwest is well represented. Happy Friday. All right, we are so glad to have you here. Daniel Webber is, if you didn't already know this, a member of the National Cub Scout Committee. He's authored a lot of the activities to help complete the adventures and the ranks.

2:13And he has a very strong background and Cub Scott Pack administration both as a committee chair and as a as a commissioner. Professionally, Daniel's superpower is that he is an accountant. And that confluence of volunteer expertise and professional expertise makes him a very good subject matter expert on the topic of Cub Scout pack budgets. So let's jump in Daniel. Why is it important for the volunteers of a Cub Scout pack to have a budget? Because you need to know where the money's going to come from to do all the fun things.

2:45You don't want to get into your program year and get the blue and gold and all of a sudden the bank account's empty and you're going, Oh no, what are we going to do? How are we going to pay for X? Whatever X is crossover? How are we going to pay for the books? How are we going to pay for the neckerchiefs? How are we going to buy the adventure pins or the belt loops for the rest of the year? You don't want to run out of money before the year before you run out of the year.

3:07Yeah. No, it's, it's a very important process and the and the PAC budget supports a lot of things. You know, how does the support healthy programming? You touched on that a little bit already. You, you want to be upfront with your parents. If it's going to cost $100 a year, $150.00 a year, $50 a year, whatever the number is, you want to be upfront with your parents. You don't have to go back to them later and say hey, we need to fundraise more than we thought, or hey, we need more money from you.

3:31You want to be able, you want to demonstrate to your families that you know what you're doing and that excuse me and that you're prepared for the program year. It proper planning is important. Absolutely. All right. So as we think about this, when is a good time to do your PAC budget planning? You should be doing it all year long, but the most important time is when you do that annual program planning. Most PACs seem to do it in early to Midsummer.

3:59My PAC does it in July. I was sharing with you before we got on the on the call here today. We had a big PAC meeting in July with all the parents that are able to come and we plan our entire program year and our budget all in one meeting. It sounds like you make some really important decisions at this. Tell me about some of the information that they need to have to get started on planning their budget. What are some of the decisions you make at this planning meeting when you when you prepare to do your budget?

4:25The big ones are #1 how many people do you going to have? How many kids do you expect to have? How many do you normally recruit when you do that in school recruiting in the fall? What kinds of things is the pack going to pay for? What kinds of things is the pack not going to pay for? I shared with you earlier our pack, we actually don't pay leader dues. Leaders pay their own way. Some packs, they want the the, the pack budget to cover the leader dues.

4:51Also, what kind of program are you going to have? What kinds of things are you going to do? If you're going to do things that are more expensive, if you're going to camp at public paint campgrounds that are more expensive than council campgrounds, you need to budget for that and have that in your budget. When you camp, are you going to cover the food out of the annual budget or are you going to ask for the families to shell out? When you go camping, there's a lot of decision points that have to be made there. Are you going to be buying neckerchiefs and and slides and books when the kids bridge from year to year? Or do you have enough in stock that you're going to, you know, reuse the old ones?

5:23There's a lot of decision points. You just have to decide what are you paying for and what are you not paying for every year. Yeah, and, and it sounds like that decision's a lot easier to make over, you know, a nice beverage of your choice and maybe a warm dinner and sitting there with your friends who are also helping roam the Cubs Cup pack, like over a relaxed meal as opposed to midnight when we finally have time to plan something like 2 days before the meeting. With what I do professionally, I'm big on extensions and big on last minute and meeting those deadlines. But you don't want to do that with this. You want to plan this ahead of time. It's going to run a lot smoother if you have this budget hammered out and everybody has seen it, everybody agrees to it on the front end.

5:59Sounds like it's a lot less stressful too. It's a whole lot less stressful. Fantastic. I think you might have mentioned that you have an example or a template of a packed budget that you could walk us through. Sure. Why don't you go ahead and do that, Brian? Could you bring that sample up for us, please? So I went through last night. This template will will show you guys how to get to it in a few minutes. But this template is available on the scouting website. It's in the PEC committee resources. What I did is I went through and and some of the data in here is real and some of the days a little fictitious. I wanted to kind of talk about some of the decision points along the way.

6:36The most important step at the beginning, though, is right at the top, right where you enter your numbers. How many kids do you expect to have? How many registered adults do you expect to have? That kind of drives a lot of the decision points the rest of the way. Some of the dollar amounts in here are going to be fixed. Some of the dollar amounts you're going to have some some play with on what you're going to pay for, what you're not going to pay for kind of walking right down the line. You know, I've put in a pack of 50 kids and 20 adults. That's about what our my my daughter's pack is. It fluctuates a little like everybody else, but that's about what we are right now.

7:11The very first line item there's registration fees. Those are fixed. Everybody knows the the youth registration fees, $85 * 50 kids, that's forty $250. Next line item is the adults. This is that first decision point I talked about earlier. Where are you going to pay for the adults or you're not going to pay for the adults? In our pack, we actually don't pay for the adults. The adults pay their own way. So our line item there is 0 because the adults are paying their own way as they go.

7:41Oh, there's the link. The link for the worksheet is right there, Brian. Just put it up on the screen. And then the next line item is the annual charter fee. That's $100. Everybody knows that one. The next one is where your, your counsel and my counsel are going to be different. My counsel charges 25 per scout and 16 per adult. Now I broke it out into this line and the, the line 22 lines down to capture that. But you're going to need to find out what your counsel charges and put that number in. And we're going down working my way down here and I'm sorry it's small on my screen.

8:21Scout Life magazine is next. Those are $15 a year times however many kids, 50 kids in our case, $750 and we talked about the insurance earlier. My counsel is the 16 for everybody and then 25 for the kids, which is where we have the $9 two lines up. And then the next one's advancement. That's a huge one. That's the the most public facing one that most of these parents are going to feel when you go to that pack meeting or you or you at the end of the adventure and you hand them that belt loop. You, you need to be able to pay for that and you need to figure out how many adventures your kids are going to earn in a given year.

9:00I budgeted in this example, $20 per scout in in our council. The rank patches are free if you do your friends a scouting presentation. So we don't pay for rank patches. So I budgeted for 10 adventures per scout for the year for $1000. This one is a huge expense coming up. It's the the handbook and the neckerchief in the slide. Those are, you know, as everybody knows, those are not inexpensive, but it's important to continue to hand those down. Now, in my example here, I budgeted for us having to buy all of them for every kid or every scout.

9:38That's not how it's going to actually happen because the scouts that were wolves last year that become bears this year, They're going to be using the bear neckerchiefs and the bear slides in the Berry handbooks that we borrowed from the kids who are now in 4th grade and have moved up to weed lows. But you know your pack better than anyone and what they have in stock and how much they're going to need to expect. The reality on that one is you're probably going to be having to do an inventory and figuring out, OK, well, last year there were eight bears, but this year there's a group, a new crop coming in.

10:12There are 12 and we need four more of everything to cover them. I'm I'm big on the next line. You want to thank those leaders, these leaders. We all put in a ton of time and a ton of effort and a little bit goes a long way. You don't need a huge line item of dollars there to, to recognize your leaders, but you want to be able to present them something, especially when you get that fifth grade arrow of light den leader as his kids are bridging out. You want to be able to hand him something a, a plaque or a I'm in Louisville.

10:44We, we could do the little mini Louisville slugger bats. You can engrave their name on it. It's great. Thank you. It's not terribly expensive. You definitely want to thank those leaders. Kate, do you have any questions so far? You know, I, I, I was thinking a couple of things. One of the things I always enjoyed is that we talked about neckerchiefs and how we can reuse them. And it's not just being thrifty. There's also some cool ceremonies where, you know, the, the, the Cub Scouts that are about ready to transition from, say, bears to weeblows. They can turn and welcome the, the scouts who used to be wolves into like that, that bear den, right. And so you can have some fun with that. It's not just the logistics of getting a piece of fabric from one scout to another, but you can make it meaningful in part of the program and also be Thrift 50. And as we look at registration, sometimes families, depending on what the PAC process is, sometimes the PAC will make sure everybody gets their registration renewed. Right now, it's still set up so that if a PAC decides the family can can do it on their own too,

11:43right. So as you think about some of these expenses, it's good to know what are our standard practices within this PAC and you've touched on so far a lot of really good ones. Daniel, do you mind if we take a quick break to check the comments? Not at all. Excellent. Let's see here we've got whoa, we had a lot come in. Hey, Drew Lynch said he's pretty great. Go Daniel. Yes, we're finding out that you are indeed pretty great. Jacqueline 9289, hello from pack 434 in Laredo, TX. Jason Melton 1020, another good friend of ours. Happy, good chat.

12:17Happy cub chat live Friday from the Heart of Virginia Council. Alexander Holt has a question. Is there a way to set up direct deposit yet? And I'm assuming that you, I'm going to go on a limb and assume that you mean through the registration process. And the short answer is I don't think they've got that set up for unit level like PAC dues yet. But there are ways to get stuff like you can do Venmo and you can do, you can work with your local bank to make it very easy for your families to get their PAC dues into your PAC's bank account.

12:48Let's see here. DJ Foster, hello from Troop 770 and Irving, TX Hello Neighbor Tamara is sending us love and palm trees from Saint Martin. Dave, hello from pack 125 in Wellington, FL. We are coast to coast. C3. Cooper. Before jumping into the coming year's budget, it's helpful to do a review of the plan versus actual for the current year's budget and have a rough template for next year's calendar plan. Absolutely, that is a great piece of it. Sounds like hard won advice, but it is good to look and see what did we plan for last year? Did we plan last year?

13:23What did we do? And that gives us a good frame of reference for the upcoming year. And then Alexander Holt says, is there a limit on how much we have in the pack accounts? There is no published limit on what you should have. And it's going to vary tremendously. If you're working with a pack of say 15 or 20 Cub Scouts, that's going to be a very different reasonable balance compared to say a pack with 5070 a hundred Cub Scouts. And so it also depends a little bit on what you're paying for, whether you're coordinating registration or not, whether you're covering handbooks or not, uniforms, day camp. And so what's the most important thing is to really have a good understanding of what do we want the PAC to coordinate for the families and, and what does a reasonable balance look like? And the bigger the balance, the more important it is to have those regular PAC committee meetings where we take a look at that together.

14:11All right, Daniel, I'm going to turn it back on over to you. Sure. Brian, can you throw that budget back up? Thank you. Going down the next the next set of line items as special events. What kinds of things are you going to pay for? So we talked about, we haven't talked about yet, but blue and gold. Some packs have blue and gold as a huge ordeal with I've seen the Star Wars characters that show up. I've seen huge part. Is it a full cater, you know, full meal or is it just taken and cookies? So you need to budget for that.

14:48Pinewood Derby is where our unit ends up spending decent bit of money because we're buying the cars for the kids, We're buying all the awards for the kids and, and we buy, you know, medals for the kids. We buy patches, we buy all sorts of things so that a lot of kids walk out of there with some hardware and all that stuff does cost money. The template has a holiday party in there. We don't really do a holiday party in our unit. So I kind of left that blank and then we start talking about outings and budgeting for those outings.

15:17Now I put the our our pack camp outs on there as budgeted line items. What we generally have done in the past is we ask the families to pay the the fee that the council charges for the actual camp out itself and then we cover the food as part of our budget. So that's why I put $5 per on the budget for the camp outs. Just we're covering the food. Again, your pack is going to, that's a decision point. Your pack is going to have what are we paying for? What are we not paying for out of our budget? And when you're building this, that cell is an edit editable cell.

15:54So you're going to pick that number, what you're going to pay for there. The next set of of line items there is day camp and resident camp. Some units will pay for day camp and resident camp out of their pack budget. Our pack doesn't, but that doesn't mean it. You shouldn't, but that's a a huge decision point the committee would have to go through and decide if you're going to pay for it or not. Then you get down to the program materials, you know, are you paying for the ceremony, The bridging supplies?

16:27Our pack already has most of that stuff in a tote and we have a physical bridge put away that we bring out every year for the bridge for the ceremony. But you want to budget those things. That's obviously one of the last things you spend during the year. You want to make sure you have the money by the time you get to the end of the year. Then you get to training. A lot of councils are going to charge for those training courses when you take blue. Obviously most of our training is now online, but there are still some things that you're going to go to in person. Are you going to pay for a Wood Badge for your leaders if they want to take it?

17:02Are there any other training courses that are like one of the, I'm a certified angling instructor through scouting. Is that something you want to pay for if, if a scout, if an adult wants to take it, you're not going to need to train every one of your leaders every year. So you just need to figure out, OK, we're going to have 5 new leaders. We're going to ask, you know, them to go take Ballou and it's going to cost, in my example here, $10 per per adult to take Ballou. The next section I think is really, really, really important scout assistance.

17:37My pack is in a reasonably affluent area. Most of our families just want to know what the check is, tell me how much it is. Any amount I tell them they're going to pay and be happy. But there's always going to be a family that is going to need assistance. And you do want to build into your budget some space for taking care of those families. Kate, I know you agree with me. We, we never want to turn away a family or a scout for lack of ability to pay. And I know councils have money set aside. I know there's camperships for day camp and resident camp set aside.

18:09But you want to build some money into your budget to make sure that those families can get the assistance they need. Sounds really good. Daniel. Is there a space, or maybe you're going to get to it here in a minute, Is there a space to record revenue opportunities for the pack to like doing a popcorn sale or a spring camp card sale or something like that? We're getting down there. It's a few more ones down. It's at the bottom of your screen there. The next part of that area there is contingency. You want to build some extra money into your budget for whatever is going to come up.

18:40There's going to be something, you're going to have a propane stove that dies and you need to replace. You're going to need to replace some piece of gear, your Pinewood Derby tractor going to break or you're the timer for Pinewood Derby is going to break and you're going to need to have that money set aside. In my example here, I gave $20 per scout. That may be too much, that maybe not enough, but you need to want, you do want to include that in there. So then you get to that line A where it says total unit budget, program expenses.

19:09That's how much we're going to spend this year. We're going to spend, we're budgeting to spend 15,820 on my pack of 50 scouts and 20 liters. And now you get that, you have that number, you know what your target is. Now we got to figure out how are we going to get $15,000 And the, I'm going to skip ahead just one line. The first line is how much do we have leftover from last year? Hopefully at the end of the year there's some money left in the bank account. In this example, I have $2500.

19:40So we know we have $2500 to start. And then I'm, we're asking each family to pay 150 in this example or each scout to pay 150. Excuse me. So that's 7500. So now we have $10,000 there, but we have, we have 10,000, but we need 15 to, to fund our program for the year. So we need to fundraise the other $58120. This worksheet, when you, when you do download it from the website and you start filling it in, a lot of these cells are calculated for you. And this fundraising section is one of them. There's just a couple of inputs you have to give and it kind of feeds into what you have to do.

20:19In our council, we, we do two big council fundraisers. I'm sure most councils are like this. We have the popcorn and we have the the discount card sales. For purposes of this illustration, I'm just doing popcorn only just because it's easier for, for talking about. And our, our council pays 36% Commission. So if we need $58120.00 for the 36 percent Commission, we need to sell $16,166 worth of popcorn. And if you divide it over 50 scouts, that means each scout should sell $323 worth of popcorn.

20:52Now the reality is we have the discount cards too. So we have two fundraisers and we're doing it twice a year. But trying to show the illustration here of you can plan for the fundraising and, and that way when you present it to families of we want you to sell popcorn, you can show them where the money's coming from, where the money's going to what all we're paying for. And that they understand that scouting doesn't cost just this 150 we're asking to pay, but it actually really costs more. And we're just trying to fundraise and, and help them help them raise that funds without having to write a check every year.

21:30Yeah, no, that's fantastic. One of the things that came in from C3 Cooper was packs that keep a history of their previous budgets have an easier time validating future decisions for sure. But if it's the first time your pack has done this, then having a template to work through and and make your best estimates, it's great to have a tool like this. Absolutely. And go ahead. I'm sorry. Oh, no, no, go ahead, please. Once you've set your budget and you know, in our pack, we meet in July and we do this budget and we publish the spreadsheet we share with all the families, you're not done. Even though you're done and you've published it, it's not done.

22:08We review it at every committee meeting, every month, and we go over where are we? Where are we under budget? Where are we over budget? Some of these things are going to run more than your budgeting. Some of them are going to run a lot less. If you've got a that, that All Star Den that's going out and crushing it, they're going to earn more than 10 adventures during the course of the year. And you need to be able to tweak and adjust and prepare for that and and review as it, as you're going along so that again, you don't get to March and go, Oh no, we're out of money.

22:36Absolutely. I'm going to share some comments here, Drew said. As we're all experiencing, budgeting for transportation expenses is helpful given the increase in fuel prices, especially if you're doing some sort of carpool or caravan out to a a, a family camp. Thankfully, Pinewood Derby car fuel is free. Thank you Gravity, absolutely. See here. Alexander Holt says thank you for sharing this amazing information. I get to go back into work, remember the adventures is out there.

23:04Just just have to plan how much it's going to cost, making sure we've got the resources to have the fun that we want to have. Tamara says thank you for joining the show. Have a great weekend and it could be a junior, says scouting from Nigeria. I love scouting. We're international today, Daniel. This is so cool. A long way away. That is a long ways away and that's a lot of time zones away too. We're so glad you're here. So Daniel, any other thoughts as you start to to wrap this up?

23:32I've got a couple, but I want to give you the floor first. The, the big thing is you want to plan and you want to be, you know, we all know the mottos. Be prepared. You want to be prepared for this. You, you, you want to make sure that we're giving these scouts the best, the best experience we can. And these things cost money and, and it's miserable to, to talk about it, but you need to talk about it's important. And this worksheet template that, that we have produced or that National has produced is really, really strong and it's really good. And it walks you through step by step with just a few inputs. It, it feeds you a budget that, that that can work for your pack.

24:12And as I've talked about of each of these decision points along the way, every pack is different, every council's different, every set of dynamics is different. And it allows you some flexibility of we're going to pay for this, we're not going to pay for this. And the the template in the spreadsheet is good and it's powerful enough to accommodate all of those scenarios. So this is a good starting point. And again, and I think C3 Cooper was saying you want to revisit old budgets and look at old budgets and compare budget to actual experience will get you better at this year over year.

24:44But you know, we're all volunteers and treasurers turnover and you know, the, the treasurer who did the budget three years ago is not the treasurer today. And so it's good to have these, these histories and these fact patterns to help you be better at it and, and, and continue to make a good product to deliver a good program for these scouts. Absolutely. These resources are so important. A couple of thoughts from from additional experience out in the field.

25:10You know, if your pack is going to have some sort of pack T-shirt, that's a great thing. And and if you just work that into your pack do's, then when a new family joins, they've officially joined, they've registered, you can hand them a pack T-shirt. They feel like they're part of the group immediately and it's a great way to plan the resources to help welcome new families into the pack. And as you think about like we're doing our budget and, and your pack is considering what they want to do for fundraising to provide support, thinking about how that fundraising, those opportunities are opportunities for the scouts to interact with people. And for the ones that are more experienced, they can talk about the adventures they've had for the ones that are learning, you can set them up with letting them know what they're going to get to do this year and, and, and they get to tell people about that too.

25:54And, and so, you know, having a plan and being able to share with parents, hey, when you go to the scout shop, get your shirt, get your pack number, we're going to take care of of your neckerchief in your hat or your neckerchief in your book. You know it. Letting them know what's going to happen gives every every family in the pack a little less stress to know what resources are needed and where they're coming from. The other thing is when you're recruiting and you're and you're in that cafeteria in that grade school talking to those parents, when you're able to show them a budget and show them that this is all been planned.

26:24They know they're coming into a well planned and well set up organization and they're not coming in hoping it works. You you've thought through a lot of the things that can go wrong ahead of time and you're going to have a much higher level of recruiting success. Outstanding. Brian, can you flash the link to the program resources one more time? So if you're watching this on Facebook or YouTube, it's also there's a link in the comments across all of our all of our channels here.

26:54And it's also, I believe either a link or an attachment if you go in and listen to this on your favorite podcast channel. Daniel, you've been a fantastic guest. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise on helping us make sure we've got the resources and figuring out what resources we do have so we can have a really great Cub Scouting year this upcoming year. Absolutely been my pleasure, thanks for having me. All right. Thanks to everybody for joining us and have a fantastic weekend.

27:22We're so glad you were able to be here with us. Thanks for tuning in today. Be sure to catch next week's episode Same time, Same place and let us know how we're doing at go.scoutingmagazine.org/rate Cub Chat. We love feedback and ideas for new episodes. And you can visit blog.scoutingmagazine.org/cub Chat live For all our past episodes. You can see us live. Except it's recorded, but it it was live. OK, see you next week.