Reading Time: 7 minutes
I’m still in my first year at my new role and it’s budget season. This is one of those perennial experiences that you would think would become routine. If you move libraries, though, you find that each organization does it differently, even if they use the same words. At the same time, I’ve been able to bring forward my own accreted skills. It means that I’m adapting faster, although I still have some distance to go.
Like most operational challenges, budgets are only partly a technical challenge. The bigger challenge to me is how the organization views budgets. Eat what you kill? Use it or lose it? There is a huge cultural issue centered on budgets and funding because money often stands in as a measurement of (a) your team’s value to the organization, (b) your or your team’s power within the organization, or (c) your or your team’s respect within the organization.
This is not a small issue. Especially when it is you as the law library director who has a personal impact or stake in the budget outcome. I have considered leaving one job in the past when I realized that how I was perceived internally was probably detrimental to my team’s success and funding. It really should never come to that. A budget is an operational function that, if the organization is healthy, has solid trust bonds, and knows what direction it is going, should be perfunctory.
But we know that’s not how they work. “Everyone will cut 10%” is a common budgetary approach, albeit a short-sighted one. Blanket budget cuts fail to take into account value or impact and therefore they are equal but not necessarily equitable. A large budgeted team (often an IT one) may be able to absorb a 10% cut because their personnel-to-equipment balance is better than a smaller one, where personnel often consumes most of the budget.
In some organizations there is also the concern that if you do not spend everything you’re budgeted, you will not get that money in the future. I completely understand that’s an actual reality in some organizations but I think that’s an unhealthy and fiscally imprudent way to operate. It fails to recognize that year-to-year operations change and, just like performance goals, sometimes a law library needs to move in a new direction and drop a former goal. A focus on spending everything can lead a law library to stagnate in order to protect their funding stability.
Getting to Zero
One thing I have liked about our current budget process is that it has been transparent on the administrative side. We have not been asked to make arbitrary cuts. We have been asked to use a zero-based budget process. This is a very familiar budget process for me and, frankly, is the one I prefer.
One lesson you pick up in public-facing organizations is that your budget needs to be defensible. Even when I was running a standalone law library and not drawing from a shared pool of money, every expense needed to be defensible. The easiest way I have found to do that is to start from zero each year. The alternatives—like taking last year’s budget and adding a percentage across the board—don’t make any sense to me.
In particular, a budget-to-budget comparison fails to take into account two things. First, it doesn’t look at what your actual expenses were for your last year. Your actuals may have been wildly different, for better or worse. A budget-to-actual-to-budget comparison makes more sense to me because then you can see what you thought was going to happen, what did happen, and what needs to happen next.
It also fails to take into account what changes you are making to your service delivery or collection or overall strategy. This can mean drawing down in one area (or cutting entirely) because a project has ended or a new project is starting or demands are changing. If I am looking at a budget, and all I see is the same numbers each year incrementing up, I will wonder what that organization is doing. What change are they undertaking and why is it not reflected in their budget?
A zero-based budget also means you are signaling to your oversight board or funders or whatever that are not just making random money requests. In our budget for the next fiscal year, I’ve put in money for two large conferences, one in Portland and one in Cleveland. The funds for travel, food, and lodging are keyed into the United States General Services Administration (GSA) per diem rates. This does two things. First, it shows my budget approvers that I have solid numbers for my request. Second, it gives me a confirmation of what the costs are likely to be; I’m not just guesstimating. So, while the general ledger account line will have money in it, just like it did last year, the number may be larger or smaller based on next year’s reality.
I have tended to use zero-based budgeting even if it wasn’t mandated. For me, it is the most defensible budget method. If I get a request to cut or, more likely, for more detail about a cost, I can show that each budgeted item was deliberately selected.
It may sound tricky but it’s not. In fact, you are never truly starting at zero if you have (a) any staff and (b) any contractual obligations. So, while you start at zero, you quickly populate perhaps 60-70% of your operations budget with your electronic license contract values and perhaps 90% of your expenses by adding your personnel budget. Those are going to go up (in most cases) without you making any particular request. I think that people who work in or around law libraries and who don’t work with the budget may not realize how few discretionary expenses there are.
Our fiscal year 2025-2026 budget has 52 specific line requests, spread across the entire budget: $4292 for a database, $3900 for a standing print order, and so on. The database is licensed and a contractually fixed expense. The standing print order is based on the last two year’s actuals so, even though it’s an estimate, it’s reasonably related to past practice. Some items are the only one in their budget line. Other budget lines (databases, conference registrations, library systems software licenses (like LibGuides and the ILS) have multiple items. In rare cases, there is an item with a round number in case of emergencies. This provides both budget buffer but also should be demonstrably necessary for continuity and resilience. They also act as a bellwether in my planning and in my budget discussions: if all of your emergency flexibility is eliminated, that should be a red flag that gets waved.
Accountability and Transparency
One thing I did at a public law library was try to push down accountability for funds to the manager responsible. This can be tricky but it shouldn’t be. In most law libraries, there is some sort of management function or division of labor. Also, for professional growth, having actual responsibility for a budget is an important place to learn. Anything a law library director can do to make that happen for their team, the better.
The first thing is that, except for personnel costs, I always try to make the budget open to everyone on staff. Not just the roll-up, the top level numbers, but all the detail. I create a spreadsheet that has a detailed list of the expenses we’re planning for the next year.
It’s not just altruism. Especially when you are new to a job, you don’t know everything that may need to be in the budget. This is a great way for people to provide feedback, both on things that are missing as well as things that they’d like to see added. It is an opportunity for leadership to ensure their budget is tailored to the needs of a team.
It also builds in a bit of resilience. The more people who understand how the budget is created, the more likely that knowledge can be passed forward. Also, when you know what your organization is spending money on, it removes some of the questions that can arise about leadership or management decisions. You may not agree but at least you know the details.
One thing I tried in a multi-manager environment was to create a single Excel workbook for the budget. The front worksheet was the summary of all of the general ledger (GL) account lines. Then I created an additional worksheet for each manager or person with accountability for part of the budget.
I wanted people with accountability to no longer be asking permission to spend money. If a manager has a responsibility for a financial item, they should be accountable for it. The director should not be telling them they are responsible and then requiring them to ask when or if they can spend it. The accountable person would put their requests into the budget creation process, we would all talk about them, and then, if they remained in the budget, accountability for that money fell to that person. It moves the decision about the expenditure up to the budget process. It removes the uncertainty of keeping the decision until the amount is needed.
Use Excel Formulas to Reduce Re-Typing (and Introducing Errors)
This can also sound complicated but it doesn’t have to be. If you use Excel, you can roll up all of the subordinate worksheets and display the values on the summary budget at the front. So, for example, create a worksheet for each team: Public Services, Technical Services, IT, Scholarly Comms, and so on. Create the same columns on each worksheet for uniformity. I used “name”, “description”, “amount”, and “GL line”. Most people will know the answers to the first three (“fall semester student engagement – final exams”, “donuts and coffee for students in the law library during finals”, “$350”). The GL line will be something they’ll have to learn but they’re often pretty clearly labeled (“124300 Food and Snacks for non-catered events”).
The only two pieces of information that matter for the budget summary itself are the amount and the GL. On my summary budget worksheet, I listed all of the GLs (124300) and a description (“Food and Snacks for non-catered events”) and a third column with the amount being requested for this fiscal year. I populated that third “amount” column by aggregating the subordinate worksheets, the ones filled out by others or the detail sheet that I created myself. Here’s the formula I use for a single worksheet called “Detail”
=ROUNDUP(SUMIF(Detail!$B$2:$B$5000,A5,Detail!$C$2:$C$5000),-2)Here’s a brief explanation:
- I use the SUMIF function. It looks at the Detail worksheet for the GL account codes (column B). It then compares the values in Detail!columnB with the GL account code on the summary budget sheet (A5). If ANY value in Detail!columnB matches A5, it then looks at the value in the matching Detail!columnC, which is the column with the amounts in it. It then sums all of those column C values.
- For each of the column checks, I have it look from B2 down to B5000, and then it pulls values from C2 down to C5000. The higher number is totally arbitrary; it just has to be more than however many rows are in your Detail worksheet.
- This line would change the A5 value for each row. So if your summary account lines start on A2, the first row would have A2 in the middle of this formula. The next row down would have A3, and so on.
- I used a simple one-word worksheet name, Detail. If you have a more complicated one, you can just wrap it single quotes: ‘Public Services 2025’!$B$2:$B$5000. Also, if you have multiple worksheets, your formula just adds them up: ROUNDUP(SUMIF(‘Public Services….)+SUMIF(‘Technical Services….)+….),-2)
- I wrap the entire SUMIF formula in a ROUNDUP formula. This is to round everything up to the nearest major zero. In my case, I use ROUNDUP and -2 which rounds up to the nearest $100. This gives me a bit of wiggle room on the budget side but not a huge amount. On a really large budget, you might round up to the nearest $1,000. But our non-personnel budget is about $720,000 and we have a number of lines that are less than $1000. Rounding up to a thousand would throw those numbers off.
This is what it looks like in Excel. The worksheets are named at the bottom. I pull details from the Contracts worksheet directly into Detail, so I am able to avoid re-typing values.
The benefit of all of this rigamarole is that you don’t have to create the worksheets in any order. People can just add things as they think of them. Since the SUMIF will look at a whole column, it doesn’t matter if the GLs are in any order. And since it’s a SUMIF, you don’t have to do subtotals on the subordinate worksheets (and recalculate them as the amounts change). I have found this to be a real time saver. The only place I work on the numbers is on my Detail (or team) worksheet. The calculations all happen automatically.
Next year, I will do a better job of pulling into this summary sheet both last year’s budgeted amounts and also previous year’s actuals. One challenge in law library budgeting is that you are often asking for a budget 3-6 months before you have your fiscal year actual expenditures. This means a certain amount of guess work. I am submitting our budget with 2 months remaining the calendar, which is pretty late (and nice) for me. As I learn to run more detailed historical reports, I would like to be able to compare 1-2 years of past actuals with prior budget years and that should give me some additional information when I’m crafting the non-contractual budget items.
It will be interesting to see how the next stage of this process plays out. I’ve submitted our budget and it will be rolled up into the organizational budget. The feedback I receive will help me fine tune in future years.