Analysis Of Staffing And Operating Budgets For Play Outside Non-Profit

Identify the company’s principal issues and strategic challenges.
Staffing budget meets the criteria in the memorandum and includes new position, annual increase and benefits using the correct salaries. Use the attached template in Exhibit C.
Operating budget meets the criteria in the memorandum. Use the attached template in Exhibit D.
Describe alternatives and evaluate of each alternative using quantitative and qualitative factors. Rank recommendation based on this analysis.
Provide a recommendation to company on staffing and operating budgets. Explain how your recommendation is feasible, practical, result orientated, and resolves major challenge.

The essence of staffing and operating budget is an initiative of inclusion within this company’s affairs as the company seeks to diversify its corporate environmental agendas. Within these aspects, the company creates a culture of inclusion with established workplace that support such communicative initiative that boost the employees and customers’ collective motivations to build a business community through funding diversity and inclusive recruitment as well as initiatives of retention. In an extensive perspective, it is not smooth as it is to some companies because budgeting and staffing have functional definitions that are also not the same across all companies. However, information is shared on functions that have increasing importance. This paper, therefore, seek to explain how the changes in revenues and the cost influence the decisions that are made on budget. More than that, the study will emphasize on the role of the accounting department and information to managers, the role of the budget in planning and decision making in budgeting process. The paper also explains the application of budgetary control and variance analysis in the monitory function, control, and adjustment on organization cost and performances.

Play Outside is a not-for-profit organization that develops and maintains playgrounds in neighborhoods with no playgrounds or fields. Play Outside has been operating since 2007. Play Outside’s mission is to help put smiles on the faces of children and build a better future, one playground at a time. During the 10 years of its operation, Play Outside has built 20 playgrounds. Every year at least 6new projects are submitted for evaluation, but with limited resources only 2 new playgrounds can be chosen, planned, designed and built. The cost for a new playground is $9,000 and the cost of maintenance is $1,800 for each site. The majority of the work is carried out by 15 to 20 volunteers. Play Outside's volunteers maintain the playgrounds for 10 years and afterwards a local community organization takes over maintenance (Ghanes, et al. 2014).  The paid staff oversees the administration of external grants, project applications and evaluation, maintenance schedules and volunteers. With the growing number of maintenance projects and volunteers Play-Outside will hire a new half-time Volunteer Assistant in 2018.

Play Outside’s revenue is from a lottery projects grants, individual and corporate donations. The operating expenses and some project costs are in the operating budget. The budget goal is have a surplus at the end of the year equal to 5% of total revenue received. In 2016 and 2017 Play Outside did not meet this target.  

Staffing Budget

According to the memo, the 2018 staffing and operating budgets for the Play Outside were to be prepared using the following guidelines:

The first step was to hire volunteer Assistant position at half-time in 2018. The salary between $42,000 and $47,000 per year. The position will start on January 1st. The two basic positions for the budgeting are the manager’s and administrative assistant’s position, whose position, based on year 2017’s position, received a benefit of $65,000 plus benefits and $45,000 plus benefits respectively. It is also quoted in the memo that a benefit rate of 39% was to accrue the management crews. More than that, all the current employees will receive a 3% increase, as of January 1, 2019. This would bring the total staffing budget cannot be more than $165,202 for all 2.5 position for 12 months.

Therefore, in the year 2017, the following table shows the Play Outside’s fiscal year from 2016.

Table 1: Play Outside’s fiscal year is January to December.

Using the adjustments on the exhibit table above, the staffing budget becomes adjusted as shown in the table below:

The Play Outsides 2017 actual operating and project expenses were $42,300 and are shown in the table above. In 2018, additional operating expenses are a new computer lease for the Volunteer Assistant for $225 and 3 new playground projects. Playgrounds costs $9,000 to design and build. Play Outside’s goal is to finish 2018 with a surplus of 5% of total revenue received. The adjustments to the 2017 operating expenses to include the 2017 operating expenses are as shown in the table below:

Considering the fact that the staffing budget grand total is 132,050 and the Grand total for staffing and budgeting expense is 94,726, then goal is a deficit of 74,648.

For purposes of increasing support and sustainability of the diversity and inclusion function, staff and resources, Play Outsides should increase the staffing allocated to support business units also on the rise (Ilk, et al. 2018 and Newman, 2016). The emblematic inclusion of the salaries and benefits of the management of the event should create involvement of diversity and inclusion staff members that are usually directly attributed to the overall budget, or, in certain instances, companies use dotted-line budget shares.

References

Ghanes, K., Jouini, O., Jemai, Z., Wargon, M., Hellmann, R., Thomas, V., & Koole, G. (2014, December). A comprehensive simulation modeling of an emergency department: A case study for simulation optimization of staffing levels. In Proceedings of the 2014 Winter Simulation Conference (pp. 1421-1432). IEEE Press.

Ghanes, K., Wargon, M., Jouini, O., Jemai, Z., Diakogiannis, A., Hellmann, R., ... & Koole, G. (2015). Simulation-based optimization of staffing levels in an emergency department. Simulation, 91(10), 942-953.

Ilk, N., Brusco, M., & Goes, P. (2018). Workforce management in omnichannel service centers with heterogeneous channel response urgencies. Decision Support Systems, 105, 13-23.

Johnson-Carlson, P., Costanzo, C., & Kopetsky, D. (2017). Predictive staffing simulation model methodology. Nursing Economics, 35(4), 161.

Min, H., & Jong Joo, S. (2006). Benchmarking the operational efficiency of third party logistics providers using data envelopment analysis. Supply chain management: An International journal, 11(3), 259-265.

Newman, S. J. (2016). Assessment of staffing, services, and partnerships of local health departments—United States, 2015. MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report, 65.