BUDGETING AS AN INSTRUMENT OF INTERNAL CONTROL IN A MANUFACTURING ORGANIZATION

Description

BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY

According to Enudu (1999), the business environment is characterized by a lot of uncertainties ranging from such factors as: Economic environment, political and legal factors, social environment, supply and demand forces, competition, consumers’ attitude and technological changes. A critical look at the performances of some of these manufacturing business organizations will reveal a lot of business failures as a result of lack of proper planning against these uncertainties. According to Drury (2000), proper planning of business helps in reducing uncertainties thereby providing the management of these enterprises with a clear direction by determining their courses of actions in advance. According to Pandey (2010), for any enterprise to achieve these goals and objectives, they must be managed effectively and efficiently. Management is efficient if it is able to accomplish the objectives of the enterprise and becomes effective when it accomplishes the objectives with minimum efforts and costs. One of the ways in which the management can achieve these objectives is though profit planning and control or budgeting. According to Nweze (2011), Budgeting in its true word is the design of the future state of an entity and the effective ways of bringing it about. Budgeting or planning involves the determination of the future course of actions for accomplishing the objectives of the enterprise. According to Lucey (2002), the main purpose of budget planning is to provide the necessary guidelines for making decisions. With the proper budget planning, the enterprise can no longer be under the mercy of whims of Fickle economic and social forces thereby relying on the ability to sense what is required. (Nweze 2011). The value of budgeting control of any organization can never be over- emphasized as these organizations and companies have limited resources and these scarce resources impose limits on the number of extent and range of end result the organization was set out to achieve. According to Nwoha and Ekwe (1999), some of these goals include maximizing profit or achieving some satisfactory level of performance, profit satisfaction achieving continual growth or ensuring the survival of the organization avoiding risk in making investment and performing a social services desired by others. According to Nweze (2011), A budget therefore co-ordinates the separate plans of different departments in an organization be it manufacturing concerns or  non-manufacturing  concerns  and  provides  means  of  bringing  both the marketing, production and financial activities of the organization together. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM Having stated earlier according to Enudu (1999) that the business environment is full of uncertainties as a result of such factors; socio-economic issues, political unrest, demand and supply forces, legal issues and  technological changes all these affect the management of any organization in one way or the other thus needed attention for proper management. You would equally recalled that organizational goals and objectives are numerous but the means or resources for satisfying these needs are limited, at times not available hence needed control to satisfy the high priority areas. These problems enunciated above have led the researcher to find answers to such questions as follows:-

1. Do manufacturing companies in Nigeria do Budgeting?
2. If they do, what are the types of budgeting usually employed by them?
3. The type used or applied does it enhances their profit planning strategies?