Project Budget - a template

Created: November 12, 2019 at 2:22 PM | Updated: October 7, 2020 | By NZ Navigator Trust

The Project Budget is used by project managers to estimate the total cost of a project and provides the project sponsors with the information they need to develop a cost/benefit analysis for the project.

A typical budget specifies:

• Income that might include grants, donations, sponsorship, registration fees, ticket sales etc.
• Expenses like staff labour, materials procurement, fees paid, catering, ongoing operating costs and other direct costs such as travel, training, or design.

A project budget includes a detailed estimate of all costs that are likely to be incurred before the project is completed.

Throughout the course of the project, the project budget also allows your organisation to check whether or not the project is sticking to its budget.

You might want to consider presenting your budget expense items grouped by activity then listing all individual expense costs to achieve that activity eg:

• Convene (like room hire; workshop expenses etc)
• Research (consultant cost for literature review; report writer etc).

Whichever approach you take, you'll need to adapt our example project budget template to suit your project - we've included a few examples of income and expenses to get you started.

You can download our editable, Project Budget Template from the Supporting Documents section below. 

We've included a PDF overview document plus an Excel version and also a Word document - use these as 'starters' and adapt this template to suit your organisation and your project. 

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Supporting documents