 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 expand 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. 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 activities. The budget is, in essence, the short-term plan, the plan that's going to be going out in the short term. We've 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 and 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 oftentimes. 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