What is a PPBS Budget?
A Program Planning and Budgeting System (PPBS) is a budgeting system that allows you to incorporate planning aspects to your budget process. Specifically, it allows for you to develop plans and programs in concert with the resources (money, equipment, etc.) to carry them out. It is from these decisions that line item budgets (a convenience for accountants!) are created. This process also allows the information services manager/librarians to propose programs and forces management to make the decision as to whether to fund the programs.
Steps in doing a PPBS for a library/information center (all services):
- Prepare a comprehensive list of services/products that reflect the accomplishment of your goals and objectives;
- Using previously collected (or available from the literature or colleagues) data on costs of these services/products, determine the cost of each for a budget year;
- Prepare comprehensive list of programs and activities for the budget year and determine associated costs.
- Present to management, as a series of programs, for funding. Place all costs into a line-item budget, as required by the organization's practices. If desired by management, place programs in priority order along with statements of implications if not funded or if funded above requested budget.
- State the name, purpose, and objectives of the program or service;
- State the benefits of the service or program to the organization, particularly emphasizing how it enables you to accomplish previously approved goals and objectives;
- Using previously collected data on costs (or from the literature or your colleagues) determine all categories of costs (labor, materials, equipment, overhead, etc.);
- State any alternatives that exist within the organization that could be used to partially or completely substitute for this service or program;
- State the consequences of funding this service at 25% below requested budget and 25% above requested budget;
- Present PPBS for this program/service to management along with line item budget form required by the organization. This is usually called the decision package.
A Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) is a budgeting process that assumes either (1 that you have a no funding for your programs/services for the next budget year, or, (2 that you have a zero increase in your budget for the next year. Essentially, it is a variation on PPBS but with the built in assumption as stated above. Given either of these two assumptions it means that you have to justify your expenditures for the coming budget year. Any organization that uses a ZBB approach will have its own forms, procedures, etc. to present this information. Usually, you will follow the basic steps outlined above under PPBS, with the decision package (which might be just one package for the entire information center or, more desirably, several packages corresponding to major programs or services). .
