Practice Developments in Budgeting: An Overview and Research Perspective

TLDR

Practitioners in Europe and the U.S. have proposed two distinct approaches to remedy perceived shortcomings of traditional budgeting, one targeting planning problems and the other focusing on performance evaluation. The paper offers an overview and research perspective on these two budgeting developments.

Abstract

Practitioners in Europe and the U.S. recently have proposed two distinct approaches to address what they believe are shortcomings of traditional budgeting practices. One approach advocates improving the budgeting process and primarily focuses on the planning problems with budgeting. The other advocates abandoning the budget and primarily focuses on the performance evaluation problems with budgeting. This paper provides an overview and research perspective on these two recent developments. We discuss why practitioners have become dissatisfied with budgets, describe the two distinct approaches, place them in a research context, suggest insights that may aid the practitioners, and use the practitioner perspectives to identify fruitful areas for research.