Expense Budget Research Articles

Current and Future Practices in Hospital Foodservice

Objectives To identify current operational practices and expectations for future practices in hospital foodservice; establish the probability that current practices will change; and determine whether differences in practices exist on the basis of profit status and hospital size. Design A questionnaire, to determine current practices, probability of change, and expectations for future practices, was mailed to foodservice directors. Subjects A random sample of 500 foodservice directors in US hospitals with 200 or more beds. A total of 214 questionnaires were returned for a response rate of 43%. Statistical analysis Descriptive statistics were used to report current practices, probability of change, and expectations for future practices. The Kruskal-Wallis test was conducted to examine whether the probability of change ratings differed on the basis of hospital profit status and size. χ 2 Analysis was used to examine whether expectations for future practices differed based on hospital profit status and size. Results Currently 81% of hospital foodservice departments have fewer than 100 employees; 73% have revenue budgets of less than $2 million; 49% have expense budgets greater than $2 million; 55% use a selective menu, often (43%) 1-week in length; 74% use conventional food production technology; 81% have a centralized, hot tray line; 91% operate a cafeteria; 96% do on-site catering; 69% have differential pricing for employee meals; 58% have subsidized employee meals; and 19% have coffee kiosks. Changes in current practices are expected in several areas. Foodservice directors expect to serve meals to fewer inpatients (71%), employ less staff (73%), have smaller expense budgets (70%), and generate more revenue (61%). Kruskal-Wallis and χ2 analyses indicated few differences on the basis of hospital profit status and size. There was little consensus among directors on how to best respond to these environmental changes. Applications Hospital foodservice practices will change in the future. Foodservice directors are using a variety of strategies (eg, revenue-generating ventures, menu changes) to respond to current environmental changes. Increased emphasis will be placed on running a hospital foodservice department as a profit center rather than a cost center. J Am Diet Assoc. 2000; 100:76-80.

Current and Future Practices in Hospital Foodservice

The purpose of this study was to identify current and future operational practices in hospital foodservice, establish the probability that current practice will change, and determine whether differences exist based on profit status and size of hospital. Data were collected from 214 foodservice directors (43% response). Results suggested that foodservice departments of the future will serve fewer inpatients with less staff, have smaller expense budgets while expecting to generate more revenue. Expected operational changes included increases in: services provided for a fee, spoken menu or computerized menus, nonselective or restaurant style menus, self-operated food and coffee kiosks, branded products, home meal replacement programs, on-site catering, debit cards, and management responsibilities. Directors are trying a variety of strategies to deal with the changing environment; Chi-square analysis results suggest that current practices and expected future practice do not often differ based on hospital profit status and size.

Mental accounting and acceptance of a price discount

The paper reports five experiments related to a price reduction choice task. In Experiment 1 and in the control condition of Experiment 4, the finding reported by Tversky and Kahneman (1981) with the calculator problem is replicated. People show a difference in the rate of acceptance of a price reduction across the two versions of this problem. This finding has been explained as due to the use of a topical mental account of the offered price reduction. This paper studies the effect on the previous finding of four experimental manipulations of the calculator problem. In these situations, a relationship between the two purchases is provided in order to make their mental segregation difficult and favour the use of a comprehensive mental account of the price discount. Results show that when the two target purchases are embedded in a shopping list, an expense budget is provided, and subjects are reminded that they can also buy the jacket at the other store, the effect reported in the control condition disappears. These results are interpreted by the notion of the focusing mechanism.

The Operating Expense Budget: One Part of a Manager's Arsenal

When budgets are submitted, the financial department must determine if expected revenues meet expected expenses. The cost of implementing new programs, capital purchases, and operating budget should be less than the overall revenue. If it is not, the manager must reduce the budgets. The manager identifies ways to reduce the supply costs and options for changing practice and systems. Collaborative effort is involved when physician practice must change to meet the budget reduction needs. A reduction in overall expenses is needed to initiate new programs and purchase requested equipment. To prepare and finalize the operating expense budget, the manager needs to foster quality improvement in services, employ negotiation skills, justify budget proposals, redistribute funds, and seek cost-saving methods.

The Basic Economics of Hydrocarbon Vapor Control

The best interest of any company is well served when responsibility for procurement of vapor control equipment is properly fixed. From discovery of need, to final operation of the equipment, many events must occur and much effort must be expended. In many petroleum industry marketing terminals today, decentralization of control has forced terminal managers to become cost center managers as well as distribution facility managers, and this added responsibility is valuable. Who else is in a better position to evaluated the true operating costs of any equipment and to carry out the responsibility of finding the right equipment for the job at hand Where companies employ engineering staffs, the necessary support studies should be made available to the terminal manager so that he can understand and review: (1) the capital investment and related depreciation expense; (2) the need for preventive maintenance program as suggested by bidding equipment suppliers; (3) the need for local contractors to bid on preventive maintenance programs; (4) company maintenance routines and all labor expense involved; and (5) budget preparation for both capital and expense budgets.

Audit als functie van het Rekenhof

The Belgian Auditor's Office is not competent to judge good management. Parliamentary initiatives have been taken to extend its competence towards an efficiency, effectiveness and economy control. Up till 1985 the Belgian budget was drawn up according toa classification system with insufficient regard for the application ofmanagement objectives to budgetary allocation. Based on notions originating from the P.P.B.S. system the budget is drawn up now by programmes assigned to organisation divisions. In the future the parliamentary budget procedure could be transformed into a ratification of the General Budget of Expenses and a supervision of the execution of the departmental budgets. The General Budget will contain the programmes. A similar system offers the external controller a better management and control instrument.An efficiency control exists in various farms in Germany, Great-Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, France, Spain and Canada. The European Auditor's Office evaluates good financial management too.

Council, Board Meet in Toronto

Both the American Chemical Society Board of Directors and Council met during the 3rd Chemical Congress of North America, held concurrently with the society's 195th national meeting in Toronto earlier this month. The council filled a four-and-a-half-hour meeting with what had appeared to be a relatively light agenda, spending at least half the meeting on a financial tutorial presented by the Society Committee on Budget & Finance (B&F) and a debate on how much to raise membership dues for next year. The tutorial, presented in part because of the worsening deficits in dues-related programs, addressed the society's revenue and expense budgets, membership data, sources and uses of the dues pool, the society's reserves, and debts. The dues debate began with B&F's recommendation for a $3.00 dues increase, the amount calculated by the inflation-based formula in the bylaws. However, emotional pleas were made for a lesser increase as well as no increase at ...

Incremental Cost Basing of Laboratory Test Bid Proposals

Clinical laboratories in hospital are engaged in many new practices intended to maintain their historical standards of quality and service despite pressures to reduce personnel, capital, and all other direct expense budgets. Increased test volumes from sources other than hospital inpatients and outpatients may provide opportunities to cope with this problem. In this article, we describe a successful approach to acquiring such work using fee structures based on true incremental costs.

AIP in 1984: A Year for Review and Endorsement

In 1931, five leading US physics societies incorporated the American Institute of Physics. As a society of societies, AIP complements and supports the activities of its Member Societies; as these Societies have grown, AIP has also grown. What started out in the early 1930s as a small contract operation involved only in publishing has grown in staff and budget: A staff of 24 in 1945 grew to 63 in 1955, 165 in 1965, 360 in 1975, and 450 at the end of 1984; and while AIP's budget in the first year of operation must have been only a few hundred dollars, the expense budget in 1984 totaled approximately $34 million. The nine present Member Societies will remember 1984 as the year in which there was a major review of AIP operations and an endorsement by them of the role AIP plays on their behalf.

Determining a Student Expense Budget: What Costs Students Incur in Higher Education

Determining a Student Expense Budget: What Costs Students Incur in Higher Education

Citizen Participation in New York City Government

Following the example of London, England, New York City developed the first stage of Governmental decentralization in 1969 by forming 62 Community Planning Boards. In 1977, by Charter Revision, 59 Community Boards were established with expanded powers. These Boards operate in districts varying between 100,000 to 250,000 population. District Offices provided day to day monitoring of delivery of services through a small permanent community board staff headed by a District Manager. The Community Board members oversee the District Manager and the District Office. The Boards advise on all land use matters, the capital and expense budgets of the City of New York and provide planning for the welfare and orderly development of its district. After four years of operation in this final stage of decentralization with coterminus service delivery districts, the system is on the road to success.

Public Expenditures and Private Control? Health Care Dilemmas in New York City

As a new President and a new Congress prepare to tackle the health financing and delivery issues they have inherited, attention will focus on the connection between the crisis of exploding health care costs and the financial plight of the urban areas in the nation where the poor and the elderly are concentrated and the tax base eroded by out migration and economic decline. The Social Security Amendments of 1965 profoundly altered the parameters for the financing and utilization of health services throughout the nation. This paper describes the impact of these developments on the medical care economy of New York City. It examines the shifts that have occurred between 1965 and 1975 in the scope, characteristics, and role of the public and private sectors in paying for the medical care of New York City residents, and the changes thus brought about in the access of the old and the poor to hospital and physician services. It analyzes the effect of these changes, in the years before the city's fiscal crisis, on the expense budget of the city and on the capacity of the city to determine priorities in health spending. While New York City, with its five boroughs each the size of a major metropolis, is unique in many ways, its very size, as well as its historic commitment to the welfare of the underprivileged and to

New York City's Fiscal Situation*

Federal Revenue Sharing DURING THE TEN-YEAR PERIOD from 1956 to 1965-66, scale of city government finances virtually doubled throughout country. Total revenue of city governments rose 100 per cent, total expenditures increased 99 per cent, and total indebtedness was up 92 per cent. These are significant increases, of course, but they seem minor when compared to situation in New York City. In last ten years city's budget has increased from $1.9 billion to over $6.6 billion, an increase of over 300 per cent. New York in 1967 had an expense budget of $5.24 billion, of which $1.6 billion came from property taxes. Chicago, on other hand, had an expenditure level of only $423 million. It took in a general revenue of $407 million of which $210 million came from property taxes. Los Angeles had an even lower expenditure and revenue level. Its general expenditure and revenue was $384 million, $79 million of which came from property taxes. Thus, New York was operating at an expense level almost twelve times as high as that of Chicago and almost fourteen times as high as that of Los Angeles, although in population New York is only twice as large as Chicago and three times as large as Los Angeles. The long-term debt situation is similar. New York by 1965-66 had a long-term debt of over $7 billion, compared to $810 million for Chicago and $892 million for Los Angeles. Since World War II level of demands placed upon New York City has increased to point where it now simply does not have resources with which to pay for services New Yorkers desperately need. This relatively new situation is caused by what might be called the total mobility of poor. Since World War II many factors have combined to cause a great migration of people from conditions of poverty in South, Puerto Rico, and other parts of country to New York City. When poor were dispersed in little villages throughout South, few people knew or cared about them. But when they became concentrated in New York they became extremely visible. The obviously

Planning for Rational Organization of Urban Health Services

* Health Services Administrator, The City of New York. appropriated by the City Council and Board of Estimates. The figures do not include payments made under Title 18 to hospitals and other providers, nor do they include grant funds paid to the Health Services Administration or related agencies. Furthermore, the city's payments to its employees for health insurance and workman's compensation, totaling $62,500,000, are carried in separate budgets. Earlier, Mayor Lindsay had announced a capital construction budget for the Health Services Administration totaling over $500,000,000 for the next five years. Health Services Administration projects were given the highest priority in the city's capital budget. These budget figures illustrate the magnitude of public funds now available for delivering health services in New York City. About 50 per cent of the expense budget will be spent by city agencies, and the remainder by voluntary bodies and private providers, to secure care for the 45 to 50 per cent of the population of New York City unable to pay the full cost of treatment.

THE THEORY, CONSTRUCTION, AND USES OF FLEXIBLE BUDGETS*

THIS DISSERTATION deals with the general problem of flexible budgets in industrial situations. The problem has two broad aspects: first, the application of flexible budgets in a comprehensive budgetary program, and second, the relationship of flexible budgets to standard costs. Flexible budgets are dynamic cost or expense budgets expressing the effect of volume on costs and expenses. The study is somewhat comprehensive and exploratory in order to bring together for analysis, comparison, and appraisal, the various concepts, methodologies, and applications of flexible budgets. Consideration of the general problem necessitated study of certain specific problems, viz.: 1. Consideration and analysis of the underlying theory of flexible budgets-the principle of flexibility of costs. 2. Methods and mathematical aspects of the derivation and formal construction of flexible budgets. 3. Application of flexible budgets with the fixed-forecast budget. 4. Application of flexible budgets with standard costs. 5. Managerial uses of flexible budgets. 6. The interrelationship of flexible budgets and break-even analysis. The procedure involved a complete survey of current literature in order to determine the latest reported techniques, methods, and uses. The results of this aspect of the research are explained and illustrated to bring out the pertinent characteristics and interrelationships noted. This phase of the research was supplemented by field research conducted among industrial establishments to determine to what extent the reported techniques and applications are being used.' The results of the study point up the significant fact that in most cases flexible expense budgets are being used to supplement rather

Some Essential Principles for Budgetary Control

Abstract This paper presents in condensed form many of the essential principles for the application of budgeting to a business and the effective means for control. Some of the means for securing budgetary control are shown in charts and statements of the following: (1) fundamental operating relationships, (2) comparative results of operation for different sales volumes, (3) manufacturing expense budget, (4) indirect labor control, (5) sales and production coordination, (6) sales quota, (7) department quota, (8) comparison of operating ratios.

Book Review: The Fraser Budget for Personal or Family Expenses

Book Review: The Fraser Budget for Personal or Family Expenses