In this system, also called the Classical Budget System or Administrative Budget System, public expenditures are classified according to administrative units, that is, spending institutions (for example, Istanbul University) and expenditure items. Expenditure Items are the inputs used in the production of a public service. The personnel that Istanbul University must employ for the undergraduate and graduate education services undertaken, service purchases, inventory purchases, machinery and equipment purchases, etc. are all expenditure items. The amount of appropriation (spending permission) against the expenditure item shows the cost of the relevant input; Civil servant salaries, workers' wages, treatment benefits, stationery expenses, vehicle purchase costs, etc., which are planned to be paid by a business within a year, are determined separately as appropriation amounts; The total appropriation shows the annual expenditure size of the institution; It is also clear that the same amount of income is required to actually make the specified amount of expenditure during a year; Therefore, the total appropriation also shows the budget size of the institution.
In short, in the traditional budget system, the total annual expenditure of a particular public institution is included, as well as the distribution of inputs to be used within it and intermediate amounts; Therefore, it is an input-based budgeting system. As can be seen from the Traditional Budget scheme, in order to reach the annual budget size of a public institution, the expenses expected to be made during a year, such as monthly and wage payments, compensations, treatment aids, etc. for the personnel it will employ, are listed in items; Against each item, the amount of appropriation requested for the expenditure in question is stated; The total of the appropriations opposite the items shows the total appropriation amount of the personnel expenses section of the budget. Thus, the amount of each section consists of the sum of its items; The total of the appropriations required for the departments gives the annual budget size of the relevant institution, such as the Ministry of Health.
Since each expenditure item of the institution's budget is approved by the parliament as a section of the budget, the appropriation amounts required for the institution's personnel expenses, travel allowances, service purchases, consumer goods purchases, machinery and equipment purchases and transfer expenditures are approved separately. For example, when the appropriation allocated for personnel expenses runs out during the fiscal year, the permission of the parliament is required to make a transfer from the appropriation allocated for the travel allowances section. In short, since the scope of appropriations is kept narrow in the classical budget technique, institutions cannot act flexibly when using their budgets. The purpose of the Traditional Budget is to reveal whether the amount and composition of public expenditures are realized as approved by the authorized body (legislative body in the state budget, municipal council in the municipal budget, etc.).
In this way, the control function, which is one of the classical functions of the budget, is fulfilled: whether the initial appropriations are exceeded; whether the funds were used legally, etc. Public expenditures are audited financially through questions. In the traditional budget system, when appropriations are given to the spending items separately, without going into detail, the appropriations are given collectively to the spending institutions, thus we speak of an Omnibus Budget. Not placing restrictions on the allocations given to spending institutions in terms of spending areas is in line with the modern management approach in terms of not limiting the activities of managers; Moreover, being a practical method, it facilitates the stages of preparing the budget and discussing it in the legislature. However, the omnibus budget also has its drawbacks: arbitrariness in expenditures may occur as a result of leaving the manager free in the use of appropriations; Therefore, emphasis should be placed on ex post audits; For this reason, the funds given as a bag should be recorded in detail as they are used.
