How to navigate your team budget like a pro

As a Product Designer here at FlipGive, I spend my time talking to busy sports parents in order to understand how FlipGive can make their lives easier.

I have interviewed and surveyed hundreds of folks responsible for their team budget and regardless of sport or city, one thing is clear: team budgeting is a serious pain in the pants. But there’s hope! I’ll be sharing the top pains and pointers I collected with you so you can expertly navigate your team budget.

1. Being a new budgeter is painful.
For first-time budgeters, being asked to whip up a spreadsheet and manage the team budget feels like being asked to calculate the circumference of the sun. It’s no wonder most new managers reported taking 2 - 3 years to develop a budgeting system they felt confident in.

If this sounds like you, try getting your team’s previous budget manager to send you last season’s budget that can serve as your guide. Look to your club, association, or another team member to help you source this and other useful materials before you begin.

2. Nagging parents sucks.
Reminding parents to pay their fees is awkward. You don’t know if someone is financially unable to make the payment or simply just forgot. On top of that, having to track who paid, how much they paid, and who still owes money is frustrating and time-consuming. 

As a solution, more managers are digitizing their fee payments so that money can be transferred immediately, rather than having to chase down cash or checks. 

3. There is no centralized system for team budgeting.
Every treasurer crafts their own budgeting cocktail. Usually that includes spreadsheets, accounting software, emails, Facebook pages, Venmo or other e-transferring services, online banking apps, receipts and loose papers in the glovebox, misplaced manilla folders, and lots of Advil. If keeping track of all those tools wasn’t enough, they each operate in their own silo, leaving you to figure out a way to pull everything together just so you can get an accurate look at your budget. This tedious and manual task burns up hours of your nonexistent free time. 

We searched high and low, but it turned out there was no good solution for this problem, so we made one!

Introducing FlipGive Budget
With all these frustrations top of mind, we set out to build a free team budgeting and payment solution designed specifically for youth sports teams. Our goal was to get everything in one place and automate your least favorite tasks!

FlipGive Budget lets you:

• Set up your budget in minutes with premade spreadsheets
• Connect to team bank accounts to automatically track income and expenses
• Easily see where the budget stands at a glance with real-time graphs and charts
• Schedule and securely collect team fees online
• Automatically remind parents when it’s time to pay their fees
• Generate reports to share anytime for complete transparency

We hope you’re just as excited as we are about it and you’ll give it a try, completely for free! For more details head to budget.flipgive.com.

Happy Budgeting!
Jason