At the core, budgeting is about distributing and redistributing limited financial resources for continuous improvement. Incremental budgeting is limited in achieving the goal due to lack of connection between outcomes and budget decisions. Zero-based budgeting fills the gap, but is cumbersome to implement, especially for large urban school districts. Additionally, it could potentially create frequent disruptions and break continuity in improvement efforts. To overcome these issues, the author proposes a cycle-based budgeting model, which combines the strengths of grant and zero-based budgeting. The key is to use cycle, which can be one or multiple years, to set accountability and expectations to nudge people into good decisions and behaviors.