An MIS Design Framework for Financial Planning and Budgeting Systems

Virtually all businesses must perform financial planning and budgeting. The paper presents a normative design framework for developing a management information system to support these activities. The design sustains planning processes across organizational levels. The system may be evoked with either a modeling or budgeting orientation which supports bottom‐up, top‐down, or in‐side‐out planning. An analysis function forges alink between top‐down and bottom‐up planning. This linkage provides flexibility in developing alternative business plans. The normative design provides a standard for creating and evaluating alternative system designs, to determine the most appropriate system for a particular business situation.