Towards Total Budgeting and the Interactive Budget Warehouse

This paper aims at establishing a strictly information system science viewpoint onto management accounting and budgetary processes. This viewpoint is presented in terms of a strictly subject-oriented, time variant data model—the so-called interactive budget warehouse. The target is to overcome the ERP/ad-hoc planning divide that challenges budgetary planning as well as budgetary control in many of today’s enterprises. With respect to technology we see the need to establish budgetary IT systems that potentially enable a total budget control across all levels down to the smallest cost units we deal with in daily operations. However, total budget control is not the target. We try to characterize a possible sweet spot between the obvious micro management of total budget control and today’s budgeting practices, which we tentatively call total budgeting. Total budgeting is the organizational concept corresponding to a reasonable usage of the interactive budget warehouse. Total budgeting is about commitment to the power of financial flows, pervasive profit and cost awareness, overcoming the budget responsibility-accountability divide, and a tight integration of budgetary control with the overall management system of the enterprise.