Different Types of Budgets, Essay Example

Financial administration is a very important tool in the criminal justice system to ensure that the department is able to carry its financial operations with greater effectiveness and efficiency. A budget is therefore the most important tool for ensuring proper financial administration. The different types of budgets that can be used by the department in financial administration are program based budgets that are used when determining cost units to be part of the operations in an organization. The approach enables financial managers to treat cost units as separate elements and not as units and their subcategories in the whole company (Sullivan, 2009).

The next category of budgets are performance based budgets which are used to show the volume of operations associated with the allocated financial resources, for instance in the criminal judicial system if the number of criminal investigations in a year are expected to be 1000, then the method enables the section to allocate sufficient resources for the identified number of investigations (Cliche, 2012).

The last category of budgets are the Line-item budgeting approach where by all activities in the organization are properly planned to ensure cost advantages to the organization. The method identifies the activities and ranks them according to level of cost efficiency and priority. When adopting this approach, issues such as emergencies and unexpected changes are taken into account to reduce disruptions with normal operations. The criminal justice system can apply this method of budgeting for all the activities of the organization and ensure priority is given to those areas that are deemed urgent, for instance hiring of new recruits may be given priority in situations of high case of insecurity in the society (Cliche, 2012).

References

Sullivan, A. (2009). Economics: Principles in action. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458:Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 502. ISBN 0-13-063085-3.

Cliche, P. (2012). “Budget,” in L. Côté and J.-F. Savard (eds.), Encyclopedic Dictionary of Public Administration, [online], http://www.dictionnaire.enap.ca/Dictionnaire/en/home.aspx