Corporate budgeting practices : empirical evidence from the Czech Republic

This paper investigates current budgeting practices of Czech companies. The article aims to provide recent empirical evidence on the impact of business complexity on budgeting in the Czech Republic, with the main focus on modern budgeting methods. Despite the plethora of critical voices against traditional budgeting, budgeting remains an essential part of most companies' corporate governance. The empirical investigation is based on a questionnaire survey and its statistical evaluation using tests of goodness of fit and cluster analysis. Fundamental research questions of the paper include the influence of business complexity on Czech companies' budgeting practices, factors that currently play an essential role and their importance, and the approach of Czech companies to modern budgeting practices. The results indicate that Czech firms use various financial management tools, including budgets. Traditional budgeting methods are still dominant in most companies; empirical data evaluation confirmed mild differences between companies financed by domestic and foreign capital; nevertheless, those distinctions were not confirmed by statistical testing. Essential factors in the budgeting practice of the respondents are the connection of budgets to strategic planning and the possibility of using budgets as a tool for business performance evaluation.