Working with forecasts like this, executives tend to dismiss the second, third, fourth, and fifth years as irrelevant and continue to concentrate solely on the current year, that is, the annual budget. Most companies seem to have passed beyond forecast planning, and its weaknesses are fairly manifest—namely, a preoccupation with accounting data as the principal output of a planning program and the assumption that the future, at least in relation to general economic indexes, will closely resemble the past.