Dada Adefolami

Dada Adefolami.

A budget is a quantitative expression of a plan for a defined period of time. It may include planned sales volumes and revenues, resource quantities, costs and expenses, assets, liabilities and cash flows. It expresses strategic plans of business units, organizations, activities or events in measurable terms.

This article is to critically evaluate the two main methods for preparing budgets – the incremental approach and the zero-based approach. Both of these have been used in both public sector and private sector organisations, with degrees of success. The budgeting process is an essential component of management control systems, as it provides a system of planning, coordination and control for management. It is often an arduous process, however, and often strikes dread in the hearts of those involved in budget preparation.

In the public sector, the budgeting process can be even more difficult, since the objectives of the organisation are more difficult to define in a quantifiable way than the objectives of a private company. For example, a private company’s objectives may be to maximise profit. The meeting of this objective can then be set out in the budget by aiming for a percentage increase in sales and perhaps the cutting of various costs. If, on the other hand, you are budgeting for a public sector organisation such as a Healthcare, then the objectives may be largely qualitative, such as ensuring that all outpatients are given an appointment within eight weeks of being referred to the hospital. This is difficult to define in a quantifiable way, and how it is actually achieved is even more difficult to define.

This leads onto the next reason why budgeting is particularly difficult in the public sector. Just as objectives are difficult to define quantifiably, so too are the organisation’s outputs. In a private company the output can be measured in terms of sales revenue, for example. There is a direct relationship between the expenditure that needs to be input in order to achieve the desired level of output. In a hospital, on the other hand, it is difficult to define a quantifiable relationship between inputs and outputs. What is easier to compare is the relationship between how much cash is available for a particular area and how much cash is actually needed. Therefore, budgeting naturally focuses on inputs alone, rather than the relationship between inputs and outputs.

INCREMENTAL BUDGETING
Incremental budgeting is the traditional budgeting method whereby the budget is prepared by taking the current period’s budget or actual performance as a base, with incremental amounts then being added for the new budget period. These incremental amounts will include adjustments for things such as inflation, or planned increases in sales prices and costs. It is a common misapprehension that one of the biggest disadvantages of incremental budgeting is that it doesn’t allow for inflation. Of course it does; by definition, an ‘increment’ is an increase of some kind. The current year’s budget or actual performance is a starting point only.

Example: ZY Company (One Man Business) will have a sizeable amount in its budget for staff salaries. Let’s say that in one particular year, staff salaries were N1.5m. When the budget is being prepared for the next year, the MD or Chairman thinks that he will need to employ two new members of staff to increase the manpower, who will be paid a salary of N30,000 each (before any pay rises) and also, that he will need to give all staff members a pay increase of 5%. Therefore, assuming that the two new staff will receive the increased pay levels, his budget for staff will be N1.638m [(N1.5m +N30k + N30k) x 1.05]

Benefits of incremental budgeting
1. As indicated above, it is easy to prepare and is therefore quick. Since it is easy to prepare, it is also easily allocated to more junior members of staff.
2. As well as being easy to prepare, it is easy to understand.
3. Less preparation time leads to lower preparation costs.
4. Prevents conflict between departmental managers since a consistent approach is adopted throughout the organisation.
5. The impact of change can be seen quickly. For example, the increase of N138k in staff costs for the aforesaid ZY company can quickly be traced back to the employment of two new staff members and a 5% pay increase because everything else in the staff salaries budget remained unchanged.

Drawbacks of Incremental Budgeting
A. It assumes that all current activities and costs are still needed, without examining them in detail. In the ZY Company example above, we know that the MD has budgeted for two new members of staff. How carefully has he looked into whether both of these new employees are actually needed? It may be that, with changes in sales, the organisation could manage with only one new staff, but there is no incentive for the MD to actually critically assess the current costs of N1.5m (provided, of course, that the funding is available for the two new Staffs).

. With incremental budgeting, the MD does not have to justify the existing costs at all. If he can simply prove that there is an increase in the number of sales equivalent to two new staff’s employee, he can justify the cost of the new staff. By its very nature, incremental budgeting looks backwards rather than forwards. While this is not such a problem is fairly stable businesses, it will cause problems in rapidly changing business environments.

. There is no incentive for departmental managers to try and reduce costs and in fact, they may end up spending money just for the sake of it, knowing that if they don’t spend it this year; they won’t be allocated the cash next year, since they will be deemed not to need it.

. Performance targets are often unchallenging, since they are largely based on past performance with some kind of token increase. Therefore, managers are not encouraged to challenge themselves and inefficiencies from previous periods are carried forward into future periods.

THE OBJECTIVE OF CHANGE
This budgeting system requires objectives, outputs, expected results and then detailed costs to be given for every activity or program. Only when all of the budgets are then put together for all of the activities is the ‘programme budget’ then complete. This budgeting system requires a degree of transparency never before seen under incremental budgeting systems and, as you can imagine, it was not welcomed by the public sector at whom it was largely aimed. Therefore, it was closely followed by the development of zero-based budgeting. Zero-based budgeting emerged first in the public sector in the 1960s, but it also gained popularity in the private sector and was adopted by Texas Instruments in 1969. It gained notoriety in the 1970s when US President Jimmy Carter introduced it in the state of Georgia. ( With zero-based budgeting, the budgeting process starts from a base of zero, with no reference being made to the prior period’s budget or actual performance. All of the budget headings, therefore, literally start with a balance of zero, rather than under incremental budgeting, when they all start with a balance at least equal to last year’s budget or spend. Every department function is then reviewed comprehensively, with all expenditure requiring approval, rather than just the incremental expenditure requiring approval.

Zero-based budgeting is an approach to planning and decision-making that reverses the working process of traditional budgeting. In traditional incremental budgeting, departmental managers justify only variances versus past years based on the assumption that the “baseline” is automatically approved.

Zero-based budgeting tries to achieve an optimal allocation of resources to the parts of the business where they are most needed. It does this by forcing managers to justify every activity in their department as they know that, until they do this, the budget for their department is zero. If they are unable to do this, they aren’t allocated any resources and their work therefore stops (as does their employment within the organisation, at this point, presumably). In this way, all unjustifiable expenditure theoretically ceases. A questioning attitude is developed by management, who are constantly forced to ask themselves questions such as:
1. Is the activity really necessary at all?
2. What happens if the activity ceases?
3. Is the current level of provision adequate?
4. What other ways are there of carrying out the activity?
5. How much should the activity cost?
6. Do the benefits to be gained from the activity at least match the costs?
All of these are largely answered by breaking the budgeting process down into three distinct stages, as detailed below.

ZERO-BASED BUDGETING(
1. Activities are identified by managers. Managers are then forced to consider different ways of performing the activities. These activities are then described in what is called a ‘decision package’, which:
1. Analyses the cost of the activity
2. States its purpose
3. Identifies alternative methods of achieving the same purpose
4. Stablishes performance measures for the activity
5. Assesses the consequence of not performing the activity at all or of performing it at different levels.