Budgeting as a strategic enabler

Abstract

Budget and budgeting have become more than just control mechanisms over the past few years. They are seen as functions for strategic planning and a method to implement or assist the strategy implementation. The research report investigated whether the budget is a strategic enabler though different contributors of the budgeting process.In previous research the dissatisfactions of the budgetary process were identified, but this excluded the impact that the budget process had on the strategic plans of an organisation. Other research was done on how strategy was done in organisations, but not which methods or instruments were used to implement strategy in organisations. This study investigated the experiences and the views of financial and non-financial senior managers and executives on the budgetary process factors that would influence the implementation of the strategic plan of the organisation. In order to understand the views of the participants, a qualitative research approach was taken in the form of semi-structured expert interviews.The findings reflect that some of these factors that were identified do contribute to the budgeting process and to the budget for being a strategic enabler in an organisation. The surprising findings were that the non-financial respondents did not believe that the use of balanced scorecards would attribute to the implementation of a strategy and that the respondents did not agree to the cycle time of the budgets proposed.