Designing a Budgeting System with Planned Confusion

• Main Author: WILLIAMS, John Joseph
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 1981
• Subjects: Accounting; Management Information Systems
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soa_research/731; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soa_research/article/1730/viewcontent/WilliamsJJ1981CMR24.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

The article explores the potential virtues of dual budgeting processes coexisting within a single budgeting information system for organizations experiencing changing environments. The treatment of discretionary cost activity in the traditional budgeting process is discussed and a comparison of the effectiveness of the techniques of zero-based budgeting and traditional budgeting is presented. Using both approaches simultaneously is said to hold potential for combining the best of both methods, but the cost-effectiveness of such a dual budgeting process is noted as a limiting factor.