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Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the changes organizations can adopt to move beyond budgeting. We show how these changes can be understood as modes of adaptive performance management that explains the ways in which organizations move beyond budgeting to become more adaptive. The proposed modes are then used to derive propositions for future research.

Methodology/approach: We follow a conceptual approach through an analysis of the beyond budgeting principles using the management and systems literatures on radical decentralization. We theorize how organizations can enhance their adaptability to environmental uncertainty through changes to their management structure and control processes.

Findings: We show that organizations can move beyond budgeting by decentralizing within or beyond their management structure and modifying or removing their budget-based control processes. We propose that beyond budgeting can be conceptualized as four modes of adaptive performance management: better budgeting, advanced budgeting, restricted budgeting, and nonbudgeting.

Research limitations/implications: The four modes of adaptive performance management can be used in future research to consider how changes to management structures and budget-based control processes can enhance the organizational adaptability needed to manage environmental uncertainty.

Practical implications: We show that while the nonbudgeting mode may be most suited to organizations facing high levels of environmental uncertainty, organizations facing low–to-moderate levels of environmental uncertainty can achieve sufficient levels of adaptability with less extensive changes to management structure and budget-based control processes.

Originality/value: The four modes of adaptive performance management reflect different approaches for dealing with environmental uncertainty. Positioning nonbudgeting as one mode and identifying alternate modes of adaptive performance management provides a basis for comparing and understanding the changes organizations make to move beyond budgeting.

This study aims to explore and understand a beyond budgeting-inspired initiative to abandon budgeting in a multinational bank.

Analysing data from semi-structured interviews with actors involved in and affected by the change initiative, this paper draws on Kasurinen’s accounting change framework as well as concepts from institutional theory to investigate the rationale for and the challenges of budget abandonment.

Although the improving financial market stability and the increasing accountability of banks after the global financial crisis motivated the initial organisational changes, the appointment of a head of finance with experience of beyond budgeting was a major catalyst of change. This change-promoting leader was of utmost importance in providing relevant training and support, facilitating the change initiative and overcoming the initial resistance to change. However, the remnants of former budgeting practice did not regress as intended, and the change initiative stalled.

This research contributes to beyond budgeting and accounting change studies by illustrating a stalled change initiative in the context susceptible to beyond budgeting ideas and highlighting the importance of aligning discourse and meaning with practice and routines.

Beyond budgeting has received an increased amount of scholarly attention in recent years. However, because most of the published research is discrete and unconnected, an overall picture of what is known about beyond budgeting has not evolved. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the available research on beyond budgeting. In particular, the authors compare conceptual papers that mostly stress the benefits of beyond budgeting with empirical evidence on beyond budgeting implementation and offer ideas for future research on beyond budgeting.

This paper uses systematic literature review methods. After an extensive database search and examination of references/citations, 32 papers were analysed with regard to bibliographical information, research design and findings.

Although proponents of beyond budgeting have put substantial effort into developing and promoting this concept, numerous empirical studies demonstrate that many organizations being investigated would still rather improve traditional budgeting than abandon it completely. This review also highlights the main criticisms of traditional budgeting, development of management control systems under beyond budgeting and factors hindering the implementation of beyond budgeting.

This paper suggests that further research is needed on the scaling of beyond budgeting, organizational changes under beyond budgeting and challenges resulting from the implementation of beyond budgeting.

The paper is the first comprehensive literature review on beyond budgeting.

Traditionally, budgeting is considered to be one of the most important management tools to steer the organisation, evaluate its performance and motivate its people. However, criticism of the budgeting process has increased considerably in the past decade. This paper aims to examine an alternative to budgeting known as “beyond budgeting”, comparing it to traditional budgeting.

Examines some of the literature regarding budgeting and describes the beyond‐budgeting entry scan, a tool which helps organisations to assess whether they are ready to start the powerful change process of abandoning the budget.

There are many possibilities, on the scale of traditional budgeting to beyond budgeting, to modernise the budgeting process. However, the beyond‐budgeting model deserves serious consideration because it enables an organisation to look with a fresh view at its budgeting process, other planning processes, and organisational structure.

Each organisation should at least explore the benefits of introducing one or more beyond‐budgeting principles. This is especially interesting because research has shown that the more beyond‐budgeting principles an organisation implements, the better it performs.

This paper aims to investigate reasons for going Beyond Budgeting and the practical issues organizations face when they change their management accounting system based on inspiration from the Beyond Budgeting model.

The authors apply a case study approach. The primary data source is interviews. The case company is a global company in the agri-food industry that is organized as a cooperative.

The authors propose that many organizations that change their management accounting system on the basis of inspiration from Beyond Budgeting will maintain fixed budget targets. Furthermore, the authors propose that even when the use of budgets at the corporate level focuses on few line items, the diagnostic use of budgeting at lower levels in the organization may focus on a larger number of line items.

The study is subject to the usual limitations of case-based research. The propositions made in the paper should be further investigated in other organizations attempting to change their management accounting system with inspiration from Beyond Budgeting.

This study shows that the lack of internal benchmarks and the need to deliver the expected results to the company’s owners might hinder the implementation of the Beyond Budgeting model as described in the practitioner-based Beyond Budgeting literature.

The paper is one of the few case studies in the academic literature to analyze the practical issues organizations face when changing their way of budgeting on the basis of inspiration from Beyond Budgeting.

The purpose of this paper is to explain the process of accounting changes and beyond budgeting principles (BBP) in the public sector as influenced by the institutional framework. It also looks beyond the outcomes of implementing budgeting changes to take into account the complexities of the factors that drive and shape the cumulative processes of accounting change.

The study presents the results of an interpretive case study in the Jordan Customs (JC) as good evidence from developing countries. It uses the triangulation of data collection methods including interviews, observations, and documents and archival records.

The paper found that JC changes to their accounting systems were influenced by the BBP, with the new budgeting systems implemented based on reconsideration and re-enacting of theoretical accounting bases and procedures. As a result, the accounting changes were managed by modifying the laws and regulations. Among the accounting changes included in the Beyond Budgeting (BB) approach in JC was relative performance evaluation, as an alternative to fixed budget targets. Rolling forecasts were prepared the BB and were employed in JC’s revenues section and the technical aspects of preparing those relied on E-views software. Most BBP were successfully implemented as values, controls, teams, goals, rewards, resources, coordination and governance. Other BBP have faced some resistance in areas of transparency, trust and accountability.

The paper uses the case study approach that yielded insightful lessons. It reveals the organizational interaction with the external environment and how BBP is influenced and shaped by isomorphic pressures. It also shows the successful and unsuccessful BBP with-(out) resistance in the public sector. This paper has important implications for change dynamics that can emerge from a BBP approach at the institutional level. It also explains the interaction between the “external” origins and “internal” accounts, which identified that accounting is both shaped by and shaping socio-economic and political processes. This broad sensitivity to the nature of accounting has important implications for how accounting change along with BBP is studied.

The paper is one of the few case studies in the accounting literature on organizations that change budgeting practice by adopting BBP. The study provides a detailed explanation of the dynamics of accounting changes through BBP in the public sector. It also provides pieces of evidence about the IPSAS and public accounting reforms in developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether a greater flexibility in the budget time-structure, which allows for shifting budgetary funds beyond the budget year, does, in fact, mitigate inefficiencies in budget spending. Traditional budgets are usually tied to a finite time span, e.g. one year, and are heavily criticized both for hampering efficient resource allocation and also for encouraging dysfunctional budget spending behaviours such as wasteful spend-downs at the end of the budget year and inappropriate holding back of funds early on.

A research framework is proposed which draws on critical perspectives developed in prior research and an analytical model put forward by Pollack/Zeckhauser that is adopted as the basis for the development of the hypotheses. In an explorative study, data from an empirical questionnaire survey administered to 219 practitioners, mainly managers, from Austria are then used to substantiate the hypotheses.

Finite-period budgets and fully flexible budgets, which allow subordinates both to save unspent funds beyond the budget year and also to borrow funds from future budgets, cause inefficiencies in budget spending. Subordinates who are allowed to spend and save funds at their discretion without being threatened by the loss of funds or imminent debts seem to spend their budgets most efficiently.

The present paper contributes to the management accounting literature by investigating a heavily criticized but rather underexplored area of budgeting and by subjecting theoretical propositions from prior research to explorative empirical testing. Enhanced understanding of the temporal effects of the budget cycle structure will help practitioners improve budget spending and should encourage further research.

The need to change budgeting has been frequently debated. Drawing on the literature on management accounting and budgeting change, this study aims to explore changes in budgeting and whether experienced success of budgeting varied with time and budget type. Changes in the use of the following budget types were investigated: fixed, revised, rolling, flexible and hybrid budgets.

This study uses a mixed research methodology. Survey data was collected from the same business units of large Finnish manufacturing firms in 2004 (Time 1) and 2016/2017 (Time 2) (N = 28). In addition, some of the respondents of the latter survey were interviewed in 2023 (Time 3).

Almost all business units were found to have remained loyal to budgeting. However, changes in budget types were not uncommon and varied considerably. Overall, the use of fixed budgets continued strongly, the use of revised and hybrid budgets declined, and the use of rolling budgets increased over time. Moreover, the joint use of budgets declined. The perceived success of budgetary processes was, initially, weakened by the use of fixed budgets and, later, by the use of revised budgets. The interview data further illustrates some of the patterns of, and reasons behind, the changes.

Longitudinal analysis of change in the same business units was useful in revealing the patterns of change in budgeting and on relationships between the variables analysed over time. Further research could be carried out using more extensive case studies in companies or sector-focused surveys longitudinally.

There is massive interest within the financial community in ways of improving and shortcutting the arduous process of planning and budgeting. Sponsored by Accenture, researchers at Cranfield School of Management’s Centre for Business Performance reviewed the literature and interviewed 15 leading companies to obtain insights into the best practices organizations are actually adopting. While some companies have simply exorcised the term budgeting from their corporate vocabularies, a group of pioneering Scandinavian companies have dispensed with budgeting altogether.

This article aims to summarize several studies about how businesses currently practice budgeting in Western and Central Europe. While analyzing these studies in the larger context of the ongoing debate about budgeting's importance, it provides conceptual linkages between them and additional insights into their findings.

The reported studies employ survey research, sometimes with panels of self‐selected interviewees within a single country and sometimes with samples of SMEs across multiple countries.

Recent survey results continue to show managers complaining about the wastefulness of preparing budgets, while steadfastly believing they are indispensable. Among others, Horváth and Partners accordingly advocate “advanced budgeting” concepts to modernize both planning and budgeting processes. CFO‐panel participants generally uphold the advocates' position except in the crucial area of available IT‐support. However, as explained next, connecting operational and strategic planning is primarily a conceptual rather than a hard‐ or software problem. In the European automobile suppliers' industry, controlling services therefore generally still rely on a small set of well‐understood standard tools.

Firms not using these standard tools in their operational controlling risk falling behind the competition. In order to close the gap between the perceived importance of and satisfaction with more complex instruments, however, several tools require improvement or simplification as well as conceptual clarity about how to employ them.

This article presents results from diverse studies on budgeting as currently practiced, reform concepts, and obstacles to their implementation. In doing so, it discusses how they relate to one another and what their significance is for both theory and practice.