Meeting and Event Planning – Preparing Your Budget – An Event Template to Cut Your Hassle Factor
What are the plans for your meeting or convention this year? Does it start with a budget or did you even do one last year? If you did one, did you do it the easy way with a Budget Spreadsheet for Meetings?
Let us discuss your needs and see what forms and budgets can be facilitated the easy way. If approached correctly, you can cut your “Hassle Factor” by more than half with the right event template.
First – History/Budget – what kind of a history do you have from your last convention? Did you fill out forms that showed all the results of your meeting? You started with a contract that specified sleeping rooms and scheduled functions, but did you update those numbers at the conclusion of your convention? This is important! You really do need to know what happened last year including your exact sleeping room pick-up, registration numbers with total income generated, specific meeting expenses and the number of attendees that attended each function. Without these numbers you are just guessing.
Second – Planning your Budget – is this easy or are you going to start over from scratch? If you kept good records and have accurate figures, then you have a great start for you next meeting. It is easy to modify last year’s information and make changes for this year. That will be necessary for a variety of reasons. You will need it to tell your hotel contact what you want and you will also need it to prepare this year’s budget.
Third – Budgeting Spreadsheet for Meetings – take the easy way out. Use a spreadsheet that will make your job easy. There are excel spreadsheets that can do it for you. Do not waste your time trying to design something that already exists and is proven to save you effort and stress.
Most planners are good at multi-tasking and have no problems designing a simple spreadsheet to handle a basic budget or designing a form to handle registration. So, you spend your time designing and stressing out. You end up with a variety of forms that each handle a specific need like registration, exhibits, food expenses and budget. The forms are not connected and do not work together. Hence, you end up having to do additional work merging the information from the various forms into your budget. Why do this when there is a Budget Spreadsheet for Meetings on the market that will tie your history, individual forms and budget together? It is so easy that all you have to do is enter the information. The spreadsheet does the rest.