In addition to using financial ratios like ROI, EVA, and RI, corporations can also use budgets and past historic data to analyze performance in the current period. Using budgets would imply a company makes estimates of values before the period and then compares those values against the actual values to analyze their actual performance against predicted performance. Using historic data implies that a company compares their actual past data against actual current data to analyze their current performance.

In your opinion, would you say budgets or historic actual data are a better tool for a company to use when evaluating current performance? Why?