Paper

The world over more and more attention is being paid to the problems of budgeting and control; of late increasing importance has been attached in Germany to the study of methods of budgeting and control. There are many reasons why this should be so, chief among them are perhaps high taxation, the difficulty of borrowing money on satisfactory terms, the severity of competition both in domestic and foreign trade, the shorter hours now worked, rising costs of labor and materials, the fact that markets are becoming more and more saturated with goods and are consequently developing into buyers’ markets, new technical discoveries which have revolutionized methods of production and forced businesses to throw over long-established practices and policies at a moment’s notice and to embark on large programs of capital expenditure. Such considerations are now forcing businesses to increase their efficiency to an extent that would be out of the question if they continued to rely only on self-operating controls unrelated to other factors. In Germany it is now the generally accepted view that unless real hard thought is given to all aspects of an undertaking’s activities, to the relation of these aspects one with another and with all other related factors, it is quite impossible to secure the efficient management of a business.