Organizations typically have more ideas about projects they might like to do than resources to do them all. So, to decide which one(s) to actually initiate, they typically compare candidate projects in terms of business case and forecast performance. Business cases can be developed by way of a number of common methods. The financial ones typically yield what is called in financial management a “figure of merit”. These enable decision makers to make quantitative comparisons of the forecast performance of candidate projects. Forecasting the payback period is one of these methods.