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Budgeting your Prom

Nobody likes setting a budget it makes us feel like we have to count every penny and always go for cheaper options, but that s not actually true.

Setting a budget is one of the most important tasks that faces a prom committee in the early part of the planning process, and getting it right can save a lot of headaches.

So what s the point of a budget?

Fundamentally, everything that has to be bought or hired for the prom will have to be paid for and to pay for it you need to find money, some of it ahead of prom night, some of it afterwards. If you don t set a budget, you have no idea how much money you have to raise, and also how much money you can realistically spend

Firstly you need the following numbers:

How many people you think will buy prom tickets.
How much money each ticket will be sold for.
Then you need to multiply them with each other, e.g.
150 tickets sold at £15 each = £2250

That s how much money you are likely to make on ticket sales BUT it is only an estimate, probably based on the number of people in your year. However, it s a good starting point for your prom budget.

So that s the maths bit (and a bit of guesswork too.) Now for the fun part.

The wish list!

Make a list of all the things you as a committee think the prom should have. Go crazy: chocolate fountains, red carpets, dance floor, the best DJ in the county, whatever. Then do a bit of research online and find out how much each one might cost. Add it all up.

This is the point when you realise that a) you can t have everything on your wish list and b) ticket sales alone won t cover the prom.

So the next stage is to prune the list: what are the most important things to have? What can the committee stand to lose from the list? When you ve got the pruned list, you need to start getting real quotes from local companies.

The next important bit of maths comes from the following calculations:

The total cost of the items on the must have list (let s say for an example this is £5,600)
The revenue from ticket sales (in our example this was £2250)

All you do is subtract the cost of the must-haves from the ticket revenue:

2250 5,600 = £3350

Uh-oh. There s a minus that s the amount of money you need to raise to be able to have everything on your must-have list.