FAQS

With Balance This Budget™, you set up a scenario based on your current budget, and then offer options for your citizens or members to adjust revenues and expenditures. You control the latitude by which each item can be adjusted.

For example, you can allow citizens to increase or decrease a departmental budget, decide between several “Yes/No” scenarios for potential projects, model the effect of new tax policies you’re considering, and many other possibilities! You then share a link with your citizens, who work within each scenario to create their desired outcome. The catch? Before they submit their budget, it must be balanced! This ensures that citizen input is informed and realistic.

Surveys can be fine for some situations, but they have several major drawbacks:

• - Surveys questions do not adequately capture the interdependence of decisions; for example, the effect of increasing the budget of one department has ripple effects to all other aspects of your budget, but surveys aren’t robust enough to capture these “What-If” effects.
• - Surveys make it almost impossible to view the tradeoffs made between different decisions, and make it difficult for officials to explain the difficult choices they made after the budget process is complete; Balance This Budget™ provides comprehensive results that you can share with citizens to help them understand each others’ collective mindset.
• - Surveys often do not communicate the relative size of budgets between different programs and departments; adding 5% to the budget of a small department won’t have the same effect as adding 5% to your largest department.
• - Surveys do not help ease the burden of making difficult financial decisions; how often do budgetary surveys reveal that citizens and members want many more services but also want to pay less? Balance This Budget™ confronts these decisions immediately as they’re made; those taking the survey can’t submit it until it’s balanced!
• - Surveys are boring! Performing stack ranking, numbering, and filling out endless “1-to-10” questions are abstractions of the budgeting process and do not bring satisfaction. Using Balance This Budget™ is easy, rewarding, and fun!

You can use Balance This Budget™ any time you want informed citizen/member input to budget scenarios. Though it’s perfect for yearly planning, think beyond just your annual budget process!

Balance This Budget™ is perfect for determining how to allocate funding from grants, drafting departmental spending plans, and exploring the possibilities of earmarking funds from a dedicated revenue stream.

Balance This Budget™ is an affordable and smart way to solicit thoughtful, realistic input from each and every submission. We base pricing on population/membership size and the length of time you wish to survey your citizens or members.

To get a price, please submit the inquiry form, or email sales@balancethisbudget.com with the details of your scenario, and we’ll send a quote right over.

When you set up and launch a budget scenario, you’ll have access to a downloadable report that provides the detailed and aggregate results about choices made for each option in the scenario. Using this summarized information, you can make informed decisions. And you can show your citizens or members that their input made a difference in the budgeting process.

Yes. When you develop your budget scenario, you’ll be able to create additional, survey-like questions to present at the end. With these, you can ask, for example, which ward or zone the user lives in, gauge their interest level in town hall meetings, or any other question with a free-form or multiple-choice answer. You will be able to see these answers in your detailed report.

Yes! While many BalanceThisBudget™ users are indeed local, regional, and state governments, any organization can create a scenario to engage its members. Pricing is affordable for small organizations, as we base it on the number of members who participate in the simulation.

You will set up the scenario based on a simplified version of your actual budget. If your budget is currently in surplus or deficit, that’s fine! You will then create:

• - Categories in each of Income and Expenditures; these categories can correspond to departments (fire, police, streets, parks) or revenue streams (sales tax, property tax)
• - Current amount (in dollars or other currency) for each category - this makes the simulation “real” by showing relative sizes of each Category of income or expenditure
• - Options within each Category; these can be things like salaries, equipment, expansion or removal of services
• - Adjustments that can be made to each Option; these can be things like increasing salaries by a certain percent, choosing between several options, or giving citizens a Yes/No choice for an option you’re considering
• - Effects of each Option; for example, hiring another employee might cost an additional $60,000 per year - those selecting this option will immediately see the effect of that choice
• - Additional information about each Option; for example, if you want to provide links or a narrative of why that particular Option is being considered, or the consequence of choosing or not choosing a particular Option
• - Additional questions for survey purposes; for example, the ward the user lives in, for purpose of tracking responses by ward

If you have the above information available, and you know which options you want to propose for consideration, setting up a budget scenario to simulate can take less than an hour, but for larger organizations or those with more complex scenarios, it might take 2-3 hours or more. The interface is intuitive and fun to use!

That’s fine! Many governments and organizations use the budget simulation process to engage citizens’ thoughtful ideas about how to get out of a deficit scenario. Beginning with a deficit budget is common and conveys the importance of the process to citizens and members.

Balance This Budget™ is a budget simulation tool that your city, county, state, or organization has chosen to use to let you participate in the budgeting process. You will see a scenario that begins with the current state of the budget. As you go through each category of revenues and expenses, you can adjust the budget based on the parameters, choices, and options presented to you in the simulation.

As you make the choices, you’ll see the slider at the top of the page respond. If you go into deficit, you’ll have to make choices that either increase revenues or reduce expenses. Once your budget is balanced and you’re satisfied with the choices, you can submit it. Your government or organization will use your informed, balanced choices to make budgeting decisions!

We think Balance This Budget™ is enormously beneficial to elected officials, leaders, citizens, and members of any government or organization. Thanks for your interest! Please send a link to this site to your elected or organization leaders and encourage them to use this dynamic, easy, and fun tool to get more informed input.

The Balance This Budget™ website does not track or collect personal information of end users; however, your governmental or organization leaders may choose to add customized questions to a budget scenario simulation that request information such as your ward, location, or other personal information. This information can be used by your government or organization to analyze their results, but Balance This Budget™ does not make use of this information beyond including it in the reports for your government or organization.