The zero-based budget is an establishment of quotas to improve the capital performance of companies, applied both in business management and in public budget programs, which requires each manager to justify in detail all of their budget requests, and the need for each amount to be spent must be justified. The procedure must identify all the decision groups that are evaluated and ordered according to their initial capital.[1]​.

It is done without taking into consideration previous experiences. This budget is especially useful in the face of the excessive and continuous increase in prices, the demands for updating, change and the continuous increase in costs at all levels. It is very expensive and contains out-of-time information, but it serves to avoid vices, repetitions and obsolescence.[2]​.

Its birth dates back to 1970, when its creator, Peter Pyhrr, introduced it to the North American company Texas Instruments. Given the success of the system, it was extended to other large companies such as Westinghouse, Boeing or AT&T. In 1971, the then governor of the state of Georgia "Georgia (United States)"), Jimmy Carter, hired Pyhrr as an advisor for the implementation of this budget system in the state administration. In 1977, when Carter was elected president of the United States, he established this budgeting technique in the Federal Administration for the 1979 fiscal year.

The germ of the zero-based budget was, according to President Carter, the so-called budget syndrome, a budgeting system that, in the inflationary environment of the 1970s, led to pressure on company budgets that generated decisions to cut expenses that were poorly motivated and that incurred serious management errors.

The antecedents of zero-based budgeting are the so-called program planning budgeting systems, known by their initials in English: PPBS, Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System; Planning, Programming and Budget System, introduced in the US Administration in the 1950s, and which sought to reform the existing budget system.

The zero-based budget was developed from the following stages:.