The Budget Process

a. A budget is a set of plans that quantitatively describe a company’s projected future operations. A budget is used as to measure actual operating results, for the allocation of funding, and as a plan for future operations. The budgeting process typically begins with a strategy planning session by senior management. The management team then applies the agreed strategic direction to a series of plans that roll up into a master budget. The plans include a sales budget, production budget, direct materials budget, direct labor budget, manufacturing overhead budget, sales and administrative budget, and fixed assets budget. All of these plans roll up into the master budget, which contains a budgeted income statement, balance sheet, and cash forecast. …show more content…
Management control is strictly dependent on the existence of goals and objectives to exemplify the proper structure and evaluation of the management process. There’s are four phases of management control: Programming, Budgeting, Accounting and Analysis & Reporting. Programming determines the nature and size of programs that an organization provides to accomplish its goals. Budgeting follows the determination of programs in the programming phase. It translates program decisions into terms that are important for responsibility centers. Accounting is the comprehensive recording of financial transactions pertaining to a business. Accounting also refers to the process of summarizing, analyzing and reporting these transactions. The financial statements that summarize a large company 's operations, financial position and cash flows over a particular period are a concise summary of hundreds of thousands of financial transactions it may have entered into over this period. Data that is analyzed and reported will largely have to be tailored to the specific circumstance or …show more content…
Zero-based budgeting starts from a zero base and every function within an organization is analyzed for its needs and costs. Budgets are then built around what is needed for the upcoming period, regardless of whether the budget is higher or lower than the previous one. ZBB allows top-level strategic goals to be implemented into the budgeting process by tying them to specific functional areas of the organization, where costs can be first grouped, then measured against previous results and current expectations. The intent of this process is to continually focus funding on key business objectives, and terminate or scale back any activities no longer related to those objectives. The basic process flow under zero-base budgeting is: identify business objectives, create and evaluate alternative methods for accomplishing each objective, evaluate alternative funding levels, depending on planned performance levels and set