Although Beyond Budgeting is about so much more than just budgets, our name tends to draw people, at least initially, towards the budget word. Once there, cost management often pops up as the number one issue, for obvious reasons. How can we manage cost without a budget?

Business schools tend to divide their curriculum between hard quantitative-oriented courses, such as operations management and finance; and soft behavioral courses, such as change management, ethics and leadership. This separation of the curriculum is like chambers in a mansion.

The purpose of a statement of cash flows is to describe how businesses receive and spend money.  This purpose is seen as an end result of financial planning but this purpose can be seen as a starting point of financial planning.  As a starting point of financial planning, people should think about how to accumulate wealth from the receipt and disbursement of cash.

“Control” is an interesting word in the management vocabulary. It is a word many managers struggle with defining. Beyond “cost control”, most are quite vague when it comes to other definitions.

The purpose of a balance sheet is to describe the resources that a business has and how those resources were acquired.  This purpose is seen as an end result of financial planning but this purpose can be seen as a starting point of financial planning. 

This article will emphasize that ZBB is not exclusively for small businesses. It discusses zero-based budgeting as a tool that can be used to improve a company's understanding of is processes, risks, and opportunities and does not need to be applied to every line or department impacted in the budget.