Zero-Based Budgeting

Zero-based budgeting is a method of preparing a budget in which every activity must be justified from scratch each cycle rather than inheriting the previous year's allocation as a baseline. Developed by Peter Pyhrr at Texas Instruments and described in his 1970 Harvard Business Review article and 1973 book, it breaks the organisation into decision units, builds 'decision packages' that describe each activity at alternative funding levels, ranks all packages by priority, and funds them in order until the budget is exhausted. In government it was famously adopted by the State of Georgia under Governor Jimmy Carter and later promoted federally, as a counter to incremental budgeting's automatic perpetuation of past spending.