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Has budgeting outlived its usefulness?
by L A McClelland
 

There is growing sentiment among business executives and accountants that the budgeting process is fundamentally flawed and should be eliminated. Proponents of beyond budgeting, the abandonment or elimination of budgeting as we know it, maintain that improvements to budgeting, such as rolling budgets, activity-based budgeting, or zero-based budgeting, are doomed to failure. To them, these fixes are like putting band-aids on a corpse.


Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser, the primary proponents for eliminating the budgeting process, write in Beyond Budgeting (Harvard Business School Press, 2003), "The dissatisfaction with budgeting [is due to] three primary factors: (1) Budgeting is cumbersome and too expensive, (2) budgeting is out of kilter with the competitive environment and no longer meets the needs of either executives or operating managers, and (3) the extent of 'gaming the numbers' has risen to unacceptable levels." Read the article.

 

 

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