Pros And Cons Of Budgeting

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Recommended: Role of budgeting as a management tool

Budgets has been widely used by a lot of organizations since it was first introduced, because it can helps managers to properly plan and control the business’s resources. Successful control mechanisms as Schick believes are the essential to budgetary development (Gray, Jenkins, and Segsworth, 2002, p.11). However, recently the use of budgets to control organizations has been the subject to criticise and debate (Hansen et al., 2003 cited in Libby and Lindsay, 2010). In this era that full of unpredictable environments has make it even harder for a business to achieve the targets set in the budgets. In fact, European surveys also reported that there has been a growing dissatisfaction among organizations about their budgeting system (Neely et al., …show more content…

There are some valid examples from literatures as to why budgets are may be unnecessary tool in a company. The problem with budgets is that the managers may be rewarded when the planned budgets are achieved. This system may lead a poor quality of budgets, because the managers would most probably only focus on achieving the target and will try to set lower goals. Jensen (2003, p.381) stated that people is getting rewards for lying in the budget-based system; as a matter of fact, the reality is that in most organizations would use budget system that rewards people for ruining important information and punishes anyone who does something that give benefit the organization. This type of activity is certainly unhealthy and completely misused the budgeting system. Other than that, if a company have a fixed-performance contract, may lead the managers into fear that if they do not spend any left overs in the budgets by the end of the year, their funding in upcoming years will be cut down (Gary, 2003). Based on Hackett survey, it showed that between 60 per cent and 90 per cent from the top 2000 global companies implement this type of contract. Hence, these practices are not that practical and may drag down the company’s performance. As stated by Welch (2005 cited in Libby and Lindsay, 2010, p.56) that budgets may conceal any opportunities and stunt growth of the

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