Budget Management

All project-oriented organizations, in particular the NGO’s, exploiting public and private donations, regardless of their mission and goals, must correlate income and cost streams at present and in the near future. A typical planning period, although moderately short, spanning 2-3 years, is sufficiently long to be susceptible to change resulting in the need of substantial revisions of the planned budget.

The principal objective of the budget planning procedure and the subsequent effort to stay within the funding bounds require correlation of the project schedule and the time constraints of the donation/funding flow. Discrepancies resulting from the varying project schedule or the change of available donations, require project manager actions and, sometimes, management intervention.

Controlling the project expenses flow would require supervision of the outflow, in particular the costs of the necessary materials, salaries, and business trips. Such costs may be sensitive to project progress, so the variation of the project schedule with respect to the fairly regular inflow of funding, may require reconciliation of budgets.

Since strict budget management procedures are usually in place, a suit of business processes must support both, the cost procedures and the revisions of the budgetary constraints. Since project reporting and documentation must be transparent and readily available for inspection, the project repository is to be modelled with rich metadata and a complex semantic representation.

The budget management platform implemented with the OfficeObjects® tools, such as the OntologyManager, WorkFlow, and Repository, has been successfully used to and verified by several years of the project management work at the WWF Poland.