Thank you both for sharing your thoughts. I agree that the budget should be fairly easy to amend, but for some reason we seem to have resisted that in the past. Maybe there were politics I'm not aware of?

In any case, at least I feel more comfortable know approving a budget for next year and knowing that we should be able to amend it as needed.

We do ours just like you do, and here's why: If you don't approve a budget for the fall before the fall, you don't have legal authority to spend any money until you do approve a budget. That can be a problem for events earlier in the year.

And there's no reason that approving a budget the previous spring limits your flexibility. Budgets can be amended easily.

Our by-laws specify the budget is to be approved at the beginning of the year, but in the past 2 years or so, I've tried to develop a draft budget at the last meeting of the previous year.

We also allow modifications to the budget as needed -- any meeting where we have quorum. And for events that bring in money -- eg, a private event at the roller rink -- we just have the board approve it.

I was wondering when everyone does their budget for the PTO year. We do our budget in April (vote in May) for the upcoming school year. That works well if you're doing the same activities and events over and over again, but it doesn't seem to allow us much flexibility to do new things.

I'm going to be the President next year and one thing I want to try is actually having committees that would meet and propose ideas. I'd love for committees to meet (and include brand new parents so they feel included) before we do the budget, but that would put us at least 2 months into the new school year before we'd have a budget.

How do your parent groups deal with this? We tend to budget per "event" so it is very specific. Maybe if we budget by category (e.g., "membership" or "staff support/appreciation") we'd have more flexibility?