The Study of Operational Budgeting Implementation in Governmental Organizations of Zanjan Province and Suggesting Required Guidelines

Abstract

The method of annual budgeting of Iran is imperfect and it needs some revisions. The structure of budget is in a way that it easily causes lots of costs and it cannot be distinguished from real and unreal or inflation resources. In current budgeting method of Iran, it is tried to take the maximum level of the costs into consideration; that is, each organization considers its current year's budget as the criterion and then without any performance assessment and without calculating the real expenses of each unit of product or service, it adds a given percent to its current years' income and costs by considering the inflation rate and other possible variables and represents it to the government as its predicted budget for the next year. However, they do not pay attention to the fact that the performance unit of the organization should be defined based on it, and the performance should be changed into figures and numbers and the real costs of each performance unit should be calculated. In recent years, Iran's budget follows programmatic system. Budgeting in programmatic system, however, cannot be the ultimate purpose of budgeting system; it is just a starting point for operational budgeting system. In other words, programmatic budgeting will be an introduction to operational budgeting. Moreover, by a comparison between operational and programmatic budgeting, it can be argued that, while programmatic budgeting only can be beneficial for guiding governmental managers in their general management and decision-making, operational budgeting controls the performance of organizational units and institutional and governmental staff as well. The present paper studies operational budgeting implementation in governmental organizations of Zanjan Province. In this regard, research hypotheses were represented and in order to verify them, after determining the sample size, data were collected by questionnaire and analyzed by SPSS and Excel software and statistical Friedman and Mann-Whitney and binominal tests. Research population included all the governmental organizations of Zanjan province and the research design was a practical and descriptive one and was performed by making use of correlation. The results showed that there is a relationship between mentioned factors and operational budgeting. Finally, based on the findings, some suggestions were represented for operational budgeting implementation in governmental organizations.