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The purpose of the paper is to report the findings of a study of the relation between perceived environmental uncertainty and the abandonment of traditional annual budgets.

The paper is based on the use of data from a survey among the largest Danish companies. The hypothesized relationships are tested by the use of logistic regression.

The results show no sign of a relationship between perceived environmental uncertainty and the abandonment of traditional annual budgets. Instead, the results show a positive relationship between competition in the environment and the adoption of rolling forecasts.

Instead of focusing on the budgeting system in isolation, future research should, to a larger extent, focus on management control systems as a package.

The results indicate that a competitive environment could be handled by retaining budgets but supplementing them with rolling forecasts.

This paper is among the first to investigate the relationship between environmental uncertainty and the abandonment of traditional annual budgets.

Budgets are commonly viewed as a central component of management control systems (MCS). The beyond budgeting literature argues that managers can develop other controls to replace budgets. The purpose of this paper is to examine the MCS package of an organisation which has never in its history had a traditional budget.

The authors carry out an ethnomethodology informed case study at Mainfreight, a large multinational logistics company headquartered in New Zealand. Data were collected from interviews with managers and accountants, internal company documents, published corporate histories, a company presentation, the corporate Web site and site visits.

The authors found that Mainfreight’s MCS package was explicitly designed based on cultural and administrative systems which supported the planning, cybernetic and reward systems managers used to monitor key drivers of short-and long-term performance with a focus on profitability.

The implication of the finding is that a more holistic view of the MCS package is necessary to understand how control is achieved within organisations that have moved beyond budgeting.

The authors show that organisations can operate without traditional budgets and still maintain a high level of control by developing appropriate cultural and administrative control systems that are internally consistent with their planning, cybernetic and reward systems.

The scarcity of organisations that have never had budgets limits opportunities to investigate an MCS package intended to function without budgets. This unique case setting reveals the design of an integrated non-budgeting MCS package.

Prior literature provides little insight on how management control systems have responded to the growth of collaborative new product development (NPD). The purpose of this paper is to contrast the use of budgets to manage collaborative and in-house NPD and to consider the implications for enabling flexibility.

The paper reports on the findings of a case study company in the medical devices industry that uses two different business models for its NPD activities. While the company engages in in-house NPD for its own products, it also engages in collaborative NPD services with a range of customers.

The study illuminates how two types of budgets (annual and project) can have very different impacts on flexibility under different business models. The annual financial budgets imposed rigid constraints on in-house NPD and resulted in reduced flexibility, whereas in collaborative NPD, they had little impact on flexibility. Project budgets created hard operational constraints in collaborative NPD which generated a highly pressurised yet highly creative environment, whereas project budgets had little impact on flexibility in in-house NPD.

The study contributes detailed empirical insights into the control systems used to manage collaborative NPD from the supplier perspective, where creativity is largely responsive and contrasts these with the management of in-house NPD where creativity is largely expected. The authors also contribute an analysis of the key control systems and other factors that sustain flexibility in this highly pressurised open innovation environment.

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 Beyond Budgeting movement has argued that traditional budgets failed to contribute to the management of tensions associated with the increasing complexity of business models. The literature has reported a range of budgeting practices developed to address these problems, which the authors refer to collectively as “non-traditional (NT) budgets.” The purpose of this paper is to consider how the design and use of a NT budgeting system facilitates the management of multiple organizational tensions.

The study reports the findings of an in-depth case study on three business units (BUs) of the French chemical giant SSB, a company that implemented a NT budget inspired by the Beyond Budgeting Round Table model.

The authors provide detailed empirical insights into the design and use of a NT budgeting system and analyze the manner in which the new system exposes organizational tensions across multiple axes.

It is a limitation of the study that only three of SSB 21 BU’s which implemented the NT budget project were examined in depth. This limitation is mitigated to some extent by the review of audit reports in respect of the implementation of the NT budget in a total of 15 BU’s.

The study contributes a means of analyzing NT budgets in terms of the different types of organizational tensions generated, which should be of use to both researchers and practitioners in researching, designing, and evaluating NT budgets.

This study provides detailed empirical insights into the design and use of a NT budgeting system and evidence of the success of this system in exposing organizational tensions across multiple axes. The study illustrates how productive tensions can be generated through the analysis of discrepancies between alternative views of organizational performance.

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.

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 the paper is to explore the use of “old” and “new” performance measurement (PM) techniques in a joint venture (JV) set up by two partners, a global hotel chain and a Portuguese company.

The empirical data upon which this paper is based was collected through a prolonged contact with the specific organizational context. Qualitative or semi‐structured interviewing is the main source of information.

The paper finds that budgeting and budgetary control practices have been the cornerstone of the PM activity at the JV, where few “new” management accounting techniques are used. Yet, changes were made to the way the “old” PM techniques are drawn on and they have been supplemented with rolling forecasts prepared at the hotel level. The objectives are to encourage local managers to become more forward‐looking and to broaden the knowledge of the global partner about the future operating activities of the JV. Simultaneously, local adaptations of PM practices introduced by this partner are occurring.

The lack of interviews with people from headquarters and area management of the global hotel chain has to be seen as a limitation of the present study. To minimize the risk of bias, a triangulation of data was pursued by interviewing multiple people at the JV and at the Portuguese partner, and by discussing preliminary findings on several occasions.

The present study provides insights on how PM practices have evolved over time in a globalized organization, enriching our understanding of those practices in the context of hotel management.

An age‐old conundrum with which marketers and, increasingly, their CEOs grapple is justifying the black hole of marketing expense. Finding a rational and reliable means of correlating marketing inputs to outputs has become even more urgent given current business economics and the decreasing effectiveness of such traditional marketing tools as advertising, promotion, and sponsorships. This article proposes two approaches that help accelerate the business impact of marketing efforts while also creating a more central role for marketing in the organization: Reorienting the marketing function around the customer experience, not the A&P mix; and breaking down the traditional annual budgeting cycle in favor of the more dynamic model of “activity‐based” budgeting. The former move reflects the expansion of customer touchpoints (interactions) as marketing tactics have expanded, and speaks to the value of mapping the customer experience to ensure related investments are aligned with value creation. Activity‐based budgeting establishes rolling, long‐term forecasts that are refined on a quarterly basis, integrating planning, allocation, and measurement and fostering a culture of measurement and continuous improvement. Moving in this direction requires forward‐thinking businesses to not only shift mindsets as to where dollars are directed, but also to shift organizationally so that budget ownership and influence are linked directly to those who know what needs to happen in the marketplace to drive measurable results – and can make it happen.