Vem använder budget?
En kvantitativ undersökning av budgettillämpningen i olika organisationer
Weber and Linder (2005) have enlightened that the focus of the current debate on the budget?s to be or not be, has been on trying to find a general tool, which fits best in all situations. They argue that the budget may be more appropriate for organizations in certain circumstances, than for others. They claim that there is a gap in research concerning the situations in which the budget may be appropriate, or when Beyond budgeting is preferred. It is this gap we are trying to fill with our thesis.The purpose of the thesis is to explain which situational factors that affect the organization's use of budgets for the functions the budget can fulfill. We examined various organizations to explain the situation dependent factors that affect the organization's use of budgets. Since the budget is a tool that can fulfill multiple functions, we have chosen to examine the use of budgets for the three functions - Planning & Coordination, Responsibility allocation, and Control & Evaluation. We chosed not to investigate the function for Motivation, since we be-lieve that motivating the employees is a function of the reward system.To be able to generalize our conclusions, we constructed a model of factors that could affect the use of budgets. To test the model, we have made a survey, which was sent to about 700 organizations. Using the responses of the survey we tested the model with regression analysis.The conclusions we have reached through our empirical study is that the organizations' over-all use of budgets is affected by the environmental turbulence, its competitive situation, the degree of formalization and the size of the organization. The organization's information sys-tem also affects the use of budgets positively, but only for the functions Planning & Coordi-nation and Responsibility allocation. We also came to the conclusion that the corporate cul-ture affects the use of budgets negatively, but only for the function Planning & Coordination.With our results and conclusions, we believe that we have filled a part of the gap in research concerning the budget?s to be or not be. We have identified situational factors that affect the use of budgets for its functions and they show when budget tends to be used.