(224)---CAPITAL INVESTMENT PLANNING AND CONTROL

Capital Investment Planning and Control

At least five phases of capital expenditure planning and control can be identified:

• Identification or origination of investment opportunities
• Development of forecasts of benefits and costs
• Evaluation of the net benefits
• Authorization for progressing and spending capital expenditure
• Control of capital projects
  

The available literature puts the maximum emphasizes on the evaluation phase. Two reasons may be attributed to this bias. First, this phase is easily amenable to a structured, quantitative analysis. Second, it is considered to be the most important phase by academicians. Practitioners, on the other hand, consider other phases to be more important.

The capital investment planning and control phases are discussed are our future postings.