Status and Challenges in Implementing Beyond Budgeting: Evidence from Sri Lanka

Abstract

Due to the weaknesses of Traditional Budgeting and Better Budgeting, budgeting moved to its third wave called Beyond Budgeting. Beyond Budgeting is an alter­native, coherent management model that enables companies to manage performance through processes spe­cifically tailored to suit today’s volatile market.
 
 Although, researchers have explained how organisations should move to Beyond Budgeting they have not discussed as to why some organisations are lagging behind in terms of Beyond Budgeting implementation. Therefore, this study intends to address and bridge the above research gap. Specifically, the study investigates how far the existing organizational set-ups support an advanced model called Beyond Budgeting and explores why can or cannot these organisations move to Beyond Budgeting.
 
 The study carries out a multiple case study approach because it provides an in-depth analysis of budgetary processes of four reputed Sri Lankan companies. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews and documentation reviews where data triangulation was used to validate the data.
 
 Based on the findings the study concluded that in the existing organizational set-ups, leadership principles of Beyond Budgeting were strongly present compared to process principles. It was also found that complications in setting rolling forecasts, bureaucracy, lack of virtues, dependency culture on budgets to evaluate performance, perceiving dynamic goals as too ambiguous to set and lack of competitor intelligence as main barriers of moving to Beyond Budgeting concept.