Capital Budgeting:

Capital budgeting is the process of determining whether or not an investment is worthwhile. Often companies will have several opportunities and must measure each one's potential in order to make a comparison and choose just one or a few. It is the process in which a business determines whether projects such as building a new plant or investing in a long-term venture are worth pursuing. Oftentimes, a prospective project's lifetime cash inflows and outflows are assessed in order to determine whether the returns generated meet a sufficient target benchmark. Ideally, businesses should pursue all projects and opportunities that enhance shareholder value. However, because the amount of capital available at any given time for new projects is limited, management needs to use capital budgeting techniques to determine which projects will yield the most return over an applicable period of time.
On the other hand capital budgeting is the planning process used to determine whether an organization's long term investments such as new machinery, replacement machinery, new plants, new products, and research development projects are worth the funding of cash through the firm's capitalization structure (debt, equity or retained earnings). It is the process of allocating resources for major capital, or investment, expenditures. One of the primary goals of capital budgeting investments is to increase the value of the firm to the shareholders. Capital budgeting involves allocating the firm's capital resources between competing project and investments. Each potential project's value should be estimated using a discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation, to find its net present value (NPV). It first applied to Corporate Finance by Joel Dean in 1951. This valuation requires estimating the size and timing of all the incremental cash flows from the project. The NPV is greatly