ZBB is about long-term resiliency, which is paramount in today's climate. In a volatile market, companies need an enterprise-wide view of investments, costs, and spending. Traditional, incremental budgeting isn't always fast or accurate enough to deliver this. ZBB is also more detailed and granular than traditional budgeting, and therefore, more accurate.

But despite its benefits, zero-based budgets traditionally have been painstaking to develop. Until recently, ZBB work was done using disconnected spreadsheets-sometimes numbering in the thousands, which introduces massive risks. The spreadsheets were emailed from person to person, with everyone making their own adjustments-leading to mistakes, broken formulas, unnecessary delays, and general frustration with the process.

In some large organizations, the sheer volume of information involved in creating a new budget from scratch every year was too overwhelming to justify a ZBB approach.