Ranking of indices affecting operational budgeting based on performance information in the country's municipalities using the AHP method

The current paper aims at structuring the implementation of operational budgeting using performance information to allocate budget resources in the country's municipalities. This is a development-applied, exploratory (causal) and cross-sectional survey. The statistical population of the study in the qualitative stage included university experts specializing in government budgeting and accounting. Experimental municipality elites were also used as experts, and finally, 30 experts were selected. In the quantitative stage of research; 420 employees working in the administrative and financial departments of municipalities were selected. The sample size of 200 people was estimated using the Krejcie -Morgan table. Purposeful and random sampling methods were used in the qualitative and quantitative sections. Experts' opinion determined 8 main indices as the main indices for evaluating operational budgeting in municipalities. These indices are (implementation, organizational performance, efficiency and effectiveness, planning, cost management, organizational change management, reward and accountability management, statistics and information management), each of which consists of several components through coding. The mean expert opinions for the first component, i.e. the method of implementation in the operational budgeting of municipalities, are such that the maximum and the minimum impact from the expert opinions are 9.6 and 5.9, respectively, while most opinions are in the range of 8.1 to 9.2. The opinions are very influential, taking into account the opinions and trapezoidal fuzzy numbers diagrams. Given the significance level of the Friedman test, because the probability value is (0.000) and is less than 0.05, it shows that the variables are significantly different from each other. The results also show that the management component of the reward and accountability system has the maximum rank and the management and statistics management component has the minimum rank. The results of the model evaluation showed that there was a significant difference and effect with respect to the mean and the difference between the means obtained from the comparison of indices and the indices affecting operational budgeting in municipalities. The significance level is less than 0.01 and has been confirmed at the confidence level of 0.99. The magnitude of this effect is (B = 0.72)), (B = 0.77), (B = 0.54), (B = 0.87), (B = 0.46), (B = 0.51), (B = 0.49), (B = 0.47)) for Implementation Method, Organizational Performance, Efficiency and Effectiveness, Planning, Cost Management, Organizational Change Management, Reward and Accountability System Management, Statistics and Information Management, respectively.