Building a Professional Race Budget with Budget Builder

Building a budget for your race may not be the most glamorous (nor the most fun) part of race directing. However, like with any other venture, having a reliable financial plan can save you a lot of anxiety and sleepless nights down the road. 

If you’ve ever had to build a budget for your business or event before, chances are you did so in a spreadsheet. You can still do that. Or you can choose to streamline the process by using a dedicated race budgeting tool. 

Enter: Budget Builder.

What is Budget Builder?

Budget Builder is an online tool for building race budgets and managing your race finances, specifically designed with the needs of race directors in mind. 

With Budget Builder you can build a full, itemized race budget for any type of race in minutes, without the need to program spreadsheet cells from the ground up. 

Building your race budget

Building your race budget with Budget Builder is an easy 3-step process:

1. Import your race details

Sign in to your Race Directors HQ user dashboard, and click the Add race button to add a new race. 

If your race in on RunSignup, you can quickly import all your race details to your Race Directors HQ account using your RunSignup registration page:

2. Launch Budget Builder

Once your race has been imported, click on the Budget Builder tab on the dashboard menu. Alternatively, you can click the Build a race budget link on your race’s summary card:

Immediately after visiting your dashboard’s Budget Builder page, you are presented with your race starter budget:

The starter budget is built around your specific race type, and has been designed to include a number of common cost items you will likely need to have on your budget (medals, insurance, race timing etc). 

3. Customize your budget

You can customize any budget item by clicking on it. When you do so the budget item editor pops up:

Though the editor, you can update the Budgeted price for that item or change the quantity this item applies to. 

If your item applies to each participant separately, like the bibs item above, the Quantity type is set to Per participant to indicate that this item applies to all participants in an event. 

If you have several events in your race (5K, 10K, Half Marathon) and want an item to apply to participants in a specific event only, e.g. the 5K, you can pick that event in the Event dropdown or select All events to apply the item to participants across all your events.

You can also add new items to your budget by clicking the + button at the top left of Costs/Revenues tables in the main budget view:

When you do so, you’ll be asked to either select an item from our pre-set common budget items:

or add an entirely new item - whatever you need to make your budget work.

As you work to build up your budget, you can find helpful tips when you hover over labels that provide additional information on budget elements, as well as Learn more links with even more details and examples for each item on the screen:

Working with multiple registration periods

Most races will have different registration periods with different entry fees that escalate from a low, “early-bird” price to a high, “race day” entry fee. 

For example, your 5K may have an early-bird price of $25 that ends on October 31, then a price of $30 that ends on December 31, and then a final price of $35 that carries through to race day of March 1.

You can add this information by clicking on any event row on Budget Builder’s event summary table: 

When you do so, the entry fee schedule editor pops up:

To add a new registration period, click on the three-dots icon to the right of any existing registration period, and a new row will be added under the existing registration period.

Registered vs projected participants

One key feature of Budget Builder is the ability to show your budget totals against both your currently registered number of participants, as well the number of participants you project to have on race day. That way you can track your budget against both your initial participation projections, and actual registrations as they start to come in.

You can specify your currently registered participants and projected race-day participants through the entry fee schedule editor. That’s the same window you used to specify your event’s registration periods:

By correctly allocating registered and projected participants across your event’s registration periods, your budget will better reflect your revenues across each period on your budget totals:

Budget metrics

Besides the itemized budget view, Budget Builder also provides several event-level metrics that can help provide some insight into your race’s financial performance. 

These metrics are located on the event summary table at the top of the Budget Builder page, arranged over rows for each of your events (5K, 10K, Half Marathon etc):

These metrics are:

• % Full: The percentage of your projected participants that have already registered for your event.
• Participant Breakeven (PB): The minimum number of participants required to ensure your event turns a profit.
• Race Day Participants Estimate (RDPE): An estimate of the number of participants expected on race day, based on the number of currently registered participants. This estimate is based on registration growth curves for different event distances taken from RunSignup’s RaceTrends report.
• Participant Profit Margin (PPM): The net profit made on each additional participant registration. You can use this number to benchmark your marketing budget.
• Profit & Loss (P&L): The profit or loss made on a specific event.

Budget variance

Lastly, Budget Builder also provides an easy way to help you track your budget variance, that is, the amount of money you over- or under-spend on items as you deliver your race. 

To track your budget variance, simply record the actual price you pay or earn on an item through the item’s budget item editor under Actual price:

In this example, you overpaid $0.05 for your bibs ($0.55 actual price vs your budgeted price of $0.50). 

When you add an actual price for a budget item, a variance number is automatically added on the budget’s Variance tab:

When all prices are in, you can use the Variance tab to see the total amount you over- or under-spent on your budget relative to your original projections.

An intuitive way to build your budget

Budget Builder provides a user-friendly way for you to build robust, powerful race budgets without the complexities and pitfalls that come with having to program your budget on a spreadsheet from scratch. 

In addition to that, Budget Builder offers instant actionable insights into your event’s financial performance that can help you understand how much money you make with each new sign up, how many sign-ups you need to break even, as well as areas of your budget where you might be under- or overestimating your costs and revenues. 

Budget Builder is free for all Race Directors HQ users with a subset of features reserved for Pro members.