Hi, I wanted to do a quick video on how to fill out the Summer Food Budget in CNPweb. Many sponsors seem to be struggling with certain aspects of this. And it can be a little bit complicated as you try to figure out how to fit your specific scenario in here and to know what all to include and what not to include.
As you’re filling out the budget, what we’re asking sponsors to do is really put in all of the costs that you anticipate experiencing during a Summer Program operation. Not just those costs that you're planning on charging to the program. As a state agency we’re required to determine whether or not you're projecting expenditures appropriately and we're supposed to determine whether or not you have enough operating funds, operating in administrative funds, to cover all of your expenditures. What we don't want to do is approve a program and then have that program have to go off, quit, or close part way through just because they didn't project accurately, or they didn't set aside enough funds to actually operate.
I'm just going through some of the common mistakes. If you have a very complicated budget, give us a call and we'll walk you through your specific scenario and help you with this. I do understand that it can be tricky.
So in the beginning here, you’re going to put in your administrative staff members names, their title, and you can actually leave the date of birth blank for now we don't actually require that for the Summer Food Service Program—but we would like you to put in a location. So maybe that's just the admin office. One of the areas that people struggle with the most, and part of it is a form design issue, is that it says annual salary but most of our sites are operating not at year-round schools but just during the summer months. When you're filling out this section, what this line is trying to do is say, “Okay, Jimmy Smith is spending 6 hours a week out of his normal 40 hours that he's working and so 15% of his time is spent working on the Summer Program.” But that isn’t really happening all year, that's just mainly happening during the summer months.
Say your summer program was operating for 6 weeks. What you would do, is if Jimmy normally works 52-weeks a year you'd want to prorate this $40,000 that Jimmy would normally receive over the course of the year and calculate what the weekly amount would be. Then that way you can calculate what the summer, throughout the whole summer, what would that be if you had a six-week program. So, if we took $40,000 and divided up it by 52-weeks in the year we get about $769.23 per week and then if you times that by the six weeks drop rating for summer what the amount really should be entered in there would be $4,615.38. That is kind of the prorated annual salary just for the summer period. Then we can stroll down here so it changes things and we can hit calculate totals and we can see 15% of the $4,615 is $692.31. That's actually what could be charged to the Summer Food Program or at least the cost that we anticipate incurring.
Then you will want to turn around and do the same thing. First, here you want to check the different duties that person will doing. Then down below you'll do the same thing for operational duties. Again, we would like you to enter in the location information for where these folks are working. If you have a vacant position, you can put that you have a vacant position here and once you have that person's information you can always come back and revise your budget and put it in. We can approve it because we know that you're trying to fill positions in gearing up for summer.
So, you’ll go through and do that same thing. Once you drop down here, you can see that the system will calculate what your operational salaries calculated out to be and also calculate your administrative salaries. That should follow across, so since we have $40,000 in there before it was at calculating a much higher amount in this line item than what it should. So what this line should be is $692.31.
This one up above here in operational, we had that one figured out okay so that we worked out all right. Where folks really tend to get off course here, is they don't understand what these Columns are for or how to break this up. So in the line items area, we have an opportunity in column A to record the expenditures that we plan on paying for with SFSP funds, or your summer Grant funds, and then in column B these would be for summer expenditures but I'm going to pay for those out of non-SFSP funds. So, maybe they’re private donation funds or some other type of source of funds. Maybe it's funds from the CACFP or NSLP. You could put those in non-SFSP funds.
Hopefully that'll make sense why we're separating that out in just a second. So what I like to do in this section, is jump down to line 16 before I start to decide what I'm going to pay for out of summer funds versus non-summer funds. I like to come down to line 16 here and look at how much do I anticipate receiving in reimbursement this year. How much money do I plan on getting from the summer grant? If you’ve operated in the prior year, a good way to do that is to look at what you got last year, and you anticipate getting about the same, maybe more, or maybe less. Depending on: Are you operating the same number of sites? Are you open around the same amount of days? Do you anticipate the same amount of kids? If you’re planning on an increase here, maybe last year you only got $20,000 and this year you think you’re going to get $30,000, we want you to put a comment in here down at the bottom—in the general comments section—and explain why you think you’re going to get an increase or decrease if it’s quite a bit different from what you got the prior-year. If this is your first year of operation, you really want to take your average daily attendance rates X the meal reimbursement rates and calculate out what you anticipate your reimbursement is going to be. If you need help calculating anticipated reimbursement, contact us and we can help you.
In this case, we think we have $28,000 in reimbursement last year and we’re expecting a modest increase to $30,000, that probably doesn't need a comment because it’s such a modest increase. Maybe you’re just open a couple more days or something. That would be okay. But the problem that I see here, is that the total in column A and SFSP funds is $44,156. So, you have all these expenditures but you're not going to get $44,000 from us. You’re saying right here that you’re only going to get $30k and so you’re projecting a loss, and you don't have any indication of how you're going to cover that loss of funds. So we wouldn’t be able to approve that.
What needs to happen is you need to either reduce these costs to be in line with how much you anticipate getting or you may say we have some other funds available that we could use to cover those cost. Maybe you get private donations. So how you would account for that, is you would start shifting some of these costs. You would decide which cost you want to shift over and pay for out of non-summer foods. What I recommend doing, is pay for direct costs first out of Summer Foods, things that are very easy to account for in the grant, such as food. So if the only food that you're buying it is for the Summer Food Program, and so all the receipts and invoices are going to be direct expenses to the program and you have $30,000 worth of those that you're anticipating, that's the first thing that I would pick. Because it's easy to show that, that's an allowable and reasonable cost to the program. You already have to keep receipts so that kind of documentation is fairly straight forward.
If you had all these cost items and this math worked out between what you plan on getting what the totals were, understand that for operational salaries and administrative salaries people would need to keep either time cards that show how their allocating and spending their time. So if you say here that for your staff half of their time was spent working on the Summer Program and half was not, you would have to have backup documentation to show that. Or for mileage we would have to see, are all miles driven on the vehicle only for the Summer Food Program and how are you tracking those differently. And so we really have to dig into any costs that fall into column A. If they fall into column B we don't necessarily have to see all that backup documentation when we come out on review because it's not being paid for out of our grant funds. So, what I would recommend, if this was your scenario, I would move these over as we have $5,000 here in non-food supplies and we have $3,000 in operational salaries.
Then we have mileage as 156, admin salaries are $692.31, so I’m just shifting these over. I think I got them all. You can come down here and click on calculate totals to see how we did. It looks like I forgot to delete these two. Let's try that again. So now what you have is you have that you're getting $30,000 in reimbursement, you have $30,000 of expenditures that you're planning on paying for, and that's all just food purchases. So, throughout the whole program you should have receipts and invoices that add up to about this amount. Then in your non-SFSP funds, you've shifted all these over and so now we have $8,848.31 worth of expenditures that need to get covered from some other some other pot of money. Where you will account for that is on line 19. It says other source of income that you will use to cover program costs.
The total of column A should equal line 16, the total of column B should be at least this number. Now it could be a little bit more, you could say, “You know what we're just going to set aside $10,000 of our private donations to cover that shortfall in reimbursement versus expenditures.” So, when I add up line 16 and line 19, I should get at least this number. The general comment section is just for you to explain any other things to us. And maybe you’re going through this process and you say, “Oh you know what? There are some other expenditures I forgot. You know we need to buy some coolers, some tongs, and some utensils for the program. And I think those are going to be about $500.” You don't have any money left here, so you know that those have to go here. So, you'll put $500 there.
You want to be specific here in other, you don't want to just say “supplies” or something like. Because than I'll have to call you back and ask you what those supplies are. I needed to determine if those are reasonable and allowable to the program. Then come down here and hid calculate totals again. You can see that the math still all lines up okay and then you submit this to us for approval. So, that's the basics. If you have questions and things are working out for you, please give me a call and I'm happy to help walk you through this. Thank you so much.