Luke Trouten is a youth worker right down the road from me in Maple Grove, Minnesota. He designed this worksheet to help with the planning of his youth group’s trip to a convention and then started using it ever since.

The most convenient thing is that it lets you play with different scenarios. (i.e. – what happens if 10 students come instead of 20) by automatically adjusting the number of hotel rooms, vehicles, and other factors based on the parameters you set for each.

It also allows you to account for any kind of subsidy you may provide from the youth budget. This is particularly helpful when I am trying to hit a particular price point. It’s nice to know how much money you need to kick in from the youth budget in order to keep it under $100 per student.

Lastly, it lets you know the cost per student with or without meals (handy for telling students how much cash to bring for fast food), and it also assumes that the cost of leaders should be spread out among the students.

He cleaned it up so it would be easy for anyone to use and is offering it for you to freely download at the link below. It includes a blank worksheet as well as an example one filled out for a hypothetical event.

Download Luke’s event cost planning spreadsheet

(Luke created them in iWork, but tested them in Excel and said they seemed to convert over without any problems.)

Check out Luke’s blog at LukeTrouten.com for more of his thoughts about youth ministry.

Posted on September 9, 2010