The Multiple Functions of Budgeting

The budget is one of the most important management artifacts and is used for different purposes. Studies have ignored that this artifact can be used for multiple functions and be perceived differently by executives within the same organization. This article discusses the idea of multiple purposes for corporate budgeting and investigates its association with the perceptions of usefulness and relevance. One single entity survey was carried out in an organization of the Brazilian Electric Utilities Industry from a questionnaire sent to executives from different areas covering a sample of 75 managers. The study reveals that the importance of the budget for both planning and dialog functions is associated to managers' perceptions of budgeting usefulness and relevance. Specifically, we have found that the dialog functions (ex post) are greater associated to the perceptions of usefulness for management and relevance for decision-making, than planning functions (ex ante). As a consequence, are obtained evidence that the corporate budgeting should not be seen as a static planning artifact, and concerns about, motivation, communication, some of the dialog functions should be considered as fundamental for the artifact to be explored with greater intensity in the organizational environment.