At the second FP&A Boar Connect, Paul Harris, Experienced Commercial Finance Director and a member of the London FP&A Board, shared his extensive Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB) experience with us.

A budget expresses thoughts with numbers. Numbers can be financial like income and cash flow or non-financial like time and volume. Expressing thoughts with financial and non-financial numbers can be done through a variety of methods. One method is zero based budgeting which like all methods has strengths and weaknesses. The purpose of this article is to examine the strengths and weaknesses of zero based budgeting. 

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.

​The concept of Zero Based Budgeting (ZBB) is by no means new. It has been around for almost 50 years and has been used by many commercial and non-commercial organisations whose overriding objectives are to shed the unnecessary expenses.

We’ve all come across checkpoints in our personal lives where we commonly think about or use phrases such as “let’s take a few steps back”, “I need to reset things” and “let’s start all over again”.

As the year slowly draws to a close, CFOs also start their annual haggling over costly budget items. Various challenges force companies to dismantle old, cost-inefficient structures. In looking for new budgeting options, a well-known but controversial method is moving back into the limelight: zero-based budgeting (ZBB).