PLANNING WITH OR WITHOUT BUDGETS? THE “NEW CONTROLLING” APPROACH

Today's companies are influenced by a multitude of internal and external factors that cause changes in its framework. Within these changes, the controlling department acquires a considerable importance, because the companies must monitor the competition on the market, the products offered, customer’s status and as well the value created. As a consequence, a requirement for controlling is to be more process oriented than was in the past. This means that activities like planning, coordination and control activities must be adapted. This process is currently called new controlling or re-engineering and some of the new tools with which it operates are for example Beyond Budgeting, Advanced Budgeting, Modern Budgeting, Balanced Scorecard, Target Costing and Benchmarking. The current paper aims to present this transition from traditional controlling to new controlling as well as the tools used by controllers, focusing more on the budgeting process as one of the main research question is: “Planning with or without budgets”?