 In this discussion, we will discuss the Discussion Question of Discuss the Benefits of Budgeting. If we do see a Discussion Question or Essay Question like this, this is a very open-ended type of essay question. Our objective is to first, a word from our sponsor. Well, actually, these are just items that we picked from the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program, but that's actually good for you, because these aren't things that we're just given to us from some large corporation which we don't even use in exchange for us selling them to you. These are things that we actually researched, purchased, and used ourselves. Bayer Dynamic? Not sure if I said that right, but this is the DT770 Pro 250 OHM Studio Reference Closed Back Headphones. I wear headphones basically every day for a large part of the day. They are important to me. Therefore, I've gone through many different kinds of headphones. I've had these for some time, and they've worked quite well. 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You can purchase one at a time or have a subscription model, giving you access to all the courses, courses which are well organized, have other resources like Excel files and PDF files to download, and no commercials. And on the essay question, if we have this in a test format, obviously we want to expand on the question to be more likely to pick up as many points as possible. If we see this in discussion, then our goal is to expand to pick up as many points within that discussion. Of course, again, this is a very open-ended type of question, so we can dive into this and go into a lot of depth and a lot of tangents if we so choose to try to pick up as many points as we can or contribute to the discussion. One benefit of the budget is, of course, that it gives us that future orientation. We're looking towards the future. The purpose of the budget is for us to think out and project out into the future. When we consider out into the future, we generally have kind of our vision, kind of our mission statement, out into the future. The budget helps us to make that vision more concrete, breaking that vision down into digestible chunks, chunks like a year and then into a quarter, possibly, and then into monthly, possibly, and go down from there so that we have those achievable goals going forward. So that's one of the things it can do for us as a company. It can get the idea of the overall goal, get the companies looking into the future to be able to get those overall vision, but also break that down into the digestible chunks and steps that are going to be needed in the near future, typically a year. The budget, of course, helps us coordinate our business activity. So if the budget is, in essence, the short-term plan, the plan that's going to be going out in the short term and got that vision, it's going to coordinate our activities within the short term and help us to get basically all on the same page, hopefully agreeing on everything within the same page. That also means that the budget is going to be an opportunity to motivate the employees. That's going to be one of the key factors, possibly one that isn't touched on as many times. When we consider the budget, in other words, we often think of the management coming in and just laying out the budget and then communicating it out and saying, hey, this is what we're going to do, and then just basically leading the way. But what we really want to see there is the budget happening from the bottom up, and we'll often see this, especially in larger companies. Again, in a small company, that might be the case. You might have the owner of the company is going to say, hey, this is what we're doing. I have the vision. I'm going to apply the vision. I know where we're going. I know how to do this. I have the best idea of what the vision will be. But once the company gets large, again, the vision is there by the top management, but the budget, the year plan, how are we going to get step by step to that vision is going to be something that's going to be needed from each department. We're going to have to get that information from each department because the CEO, the CFO, it's too big for them to really know what the best thing to do is on each department or what the data is on each department. So for that reason, logistically, and for the fact that we want to be able to involve everyone in the process, we're going to have a bottom up type of approach often times. And so that means that there's a huge opportunity to basically have communication through the budgeting process, hopefully have everybody that's involved or affected by the budget, giving input into the budget, feeling like they're involved in creating the budget and therefore invested in the implementation of the budget as well. So obviously, we're not talking about a democracy in the corporation. So don't think we're all going to vote on the budget. And, you know, most votes win kind of thing. It does have to be approved by upper management, obviously, but if we can address the budgeting process, the performance of the budget and make everybody feel that the process is good, then you can really improve the morale of the company and have everybody actually invested in there for to definitely work better to apply the budget. So that's going to be a key factor, again, one that's often not touched on in a lot of discussion questions, at least at first or in the essay questions, the budget also provides the basis on which evaluation will be made. So we're going to say, hey, this is what we expect to do. This is what we want to have happened. And therefore, once time passes, we can compare what actually happened to what we budgeted to happen. That's going to be the point of the budget. If we don't have a target, if we don't give people targets and specifically targets that they can achieve and they have control over, then we can't really assess how they're doing. So we have to have the budget. Now note, there's going to be a lot of pitfalls in that assessment, of course, and you can go into a lot of detail about how to set the right goals and whatnot, just but we could go into the fact that if the goals are too difficult, non achievable, then people get discouraged and they start to just they might not perform well. And if the goals are too low, then people will clear the goals and not be challenged at all. And they may not, they may not bring up the case that the goals are too low because they want a clearable goal. They want it to be easy in some case, but it won't be challenging and therefore they won't be optimizing performance, probably not good for the employee or obviously the company as well. So you can go into, you know, what's the best way to choose the best goal? There's a bunch of other kind of issues with goal setting and motivation involved with it, including things like compensation for reaching the goal. If there's a lot of incentive, a lot of bonuses and whatnot to reach the goal, then there's incentive for fraud or some to see just pressure, a lot of pressure to hit those targets because of all that. And that could that could hurt future performance and lead people to possibly do things that are unethical or hurt the long term vision in order to achieve the short term goal, which is not really what we want. We want to challenge people to meet the goal, but still keep the long term vision intact. And of course, we don't want to encourage anybody to do anything that would be unethical, which again, would not be good for them, the company, or for our long term vision. Once the budget has been created, we have the communication process to create the budget. Once it's done, once the decision has been made, once we've have finalized the budget, the budget's going to be a great tool for us to communicate what our goals are throughout the company. So you want to kind of keep those two separate. Obviously to make the budget, we're going to have the budgeting committee. We have everybody come together. We have a communication process. Hopefully we build rapport with everybody and it's a great communication type process. Once it's done, once the decision's made, then there's no more really negotiation about the budget that that time has passed. Now the communication should be geared towards the implementation of the budget and the budget, if done well, is a great tool for the implementation. You can take the budget. Hey, here's our roadmap. Here's what we expect to happen. Here's what we all agreed on. Here's what everybody invested in and therefore, and then we can communicate what the goals are. So the budget should be a tool for the communication of the plan once the budget has been put together.