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Plan for everything: A guide to building your event’s budget

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By Betsy Bondurant, CMM, CTE, Events Industry Council Industry Insights Committee

Accurate budgeting is critical for each individual meeting being planned for an organisation. It is important to create an accurate, estimated budget based on the number of people attending, the destination hotel (the cost of hotels in one location may be much higher than in another), transportation costs (airfare versus driving costs), food and beverages, audio-visual equipment and setup, and meeting room rental. You must also determine whether it’s a special event, such as a gala dinner, or team-building event. Be sure to include taxes, service charges and gratuities, which can add 25 percent or more to your meeting budget.

These are the typical large spending categories for a meeting. Other ancillary items such as signage, shipping costs, linens and florals need to be accounted for as well. It is important to collaborate with the meeting owner to discover all the various elements of the meeting so that an accurate and comprehensive estimated budget is developed.

In this era of SMM programmes, companies are not only tracking individual meeting budgets, but also the entire meeting spend on an enterprise-wide basis. (For those not familiar with Strategic Meetings Management programmes, SMM is a centralized way to manage all the meeting and event spend for an entire organisation, which provides visibility into all meeting and event spend, allows for cost savings and risk mitigation and ensures quality and consistency.) As a result, some meeting managers have been reducing the number of categories in the budget building and reporting tool to make it easier for people to input final budget data into their meeting technology tool. If it’s easier to do, more planners will follow the process and input their final budget numbers after the programme has been reconciled.

By limiting the individual categories, the data is more consistent, so that it can be reported accurately from meeting to meeting for an enterprise-wide understanding of the total meeting spend across the organisation. The major categories need to be clearly defined for the planners. This minimizes ambiguity and ensures that the expenditures for each category that are being actively managed are reliably captured. The major categories usually reflect those large buckets of spend discussed previously: sleeping rooms, transportation, meeting room rental, audio-visual, food and beverage, special events, taxes and gratuities.

There may be a general category for "miscellaneous" that covers items such as linens, florals, signage, office supplies, furniture rental, photographer, etc. Certainly, there are other line items that one company may find more important than another, so the list of big bucket services will vary from organisation to organisation.

A unique budget reconciliation nuance to note is specific to those in the health care vertical. This is the need for hotels to track individual expenditures for Health Care Professional (HCP) Transfer of Value (TOV) reporting that U.S. corporations need to provide to the government on an annual basis. The corporations are required to report how much they spent on each individual physician for travel, hotel accommodations, and food and beverage. The hotel needs to be instructed (prior to the meeting) of the per-person reporting requirements, so that when the final bill is prepared, they can easily provide this detailed information to the planner. When the meeting is being reconciled and the final budget is entered, the HCP TOV data needs to be reported by the planners in the appropriate tool.

The bottom line:

  • For planners, build accurate and comprehensive estimated budgets and input reconciled final budget information into the centralized budget too.
  • For SMM leads, create realistic and simplified budget tools that are easy for planners to use, so that reporting is robust and reliable.
  • For those in the healthcare space, clarify your unique HCP reporting requirements with your hotel partners before your meeting begins.

A centralized way to manage the entire meeting and event spend for an entire organisation, which provides visibility into all meeting and event spend, allows for cost savings and risk mitigation, and ensures quality and consistency.

Betsy offers a unique 360-degree perspective with more than 30 years of experience in meeting and trade show management, hotel sales, and procurement, including 17 years of direct involvement in the discipline of Strategic Meetings Management (SMM). During her 15-year tenure at the world’s largest biotech company, Betsy developed a pioneering SMM program as well as a venue compliance process for the early PhRMA guidelines. In 2007, she opened a consultancy dedicated to providing independent and unbiased SMM support. Betsy is considered a Subject Matter Expert, and has authored many articles, developed educational content, and presented to audiences in North/Central America, Europe and Asia.

Betsy holds a Bachelor of Science in Hotel Administration from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is an active member of MPI’s MD Advisory Council, is Vice-chair of the GBTA Meetings Committee, and Co-chair of PCMA’s Corporate Task Force.

In 2016, Betsy was recognized as one of the Top 25 Women in the Meetings Industry by Meetings and Conventions Magazine. Additionally, Betsy has been recognized as "Best Practitioner" by Business Travel News and one of the Meeting News "25 Most Influential People in the Meetings Industry."

 

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