ACCOUNTING ASSIGNMENT

Accounting Assignment

Accounting Assignment

Introduction

The profit and loss (P&L) statement, detailing revenue and costs, is a key component of certain SEC filings and is also a useful tool for understanding the health of a business. Executives and managers continually monitor P&L actuals versus budgets and forecasts to ensure their business is operating on plan. Automatically generated P&L reports allow managers to see current period revenue, costs, and profitability, period over period and business unit to business unit comparisons, and actuals to plan. Business intelligence also permits development of more accurate and timely quarterly and yearly performance analysis, allows navigation to detailed revenue and cost components, and enables more refined margin and contribution assessment (Ghany, 2011). By monitoring this case monthly, the Regional Manager can see that she's managed costs effectively but revenue is trailing plan. A next step would be to drill on the Internet and Telesales Revenue, which have the highest negative variance, at the country level to determine if the problem is due to one country or the entire region.

Case Analysis

Parkin Meters Ltd has grown to become both nationally as well as internationally known as a leader in the production of plastic products. Currently sales and marketing maintains many dissimilar databases to record historical sales, as well as keeping additional paper files and microfiche. Currently the company maintains a hard copy of all market size, opportunity studies and focus group information.

Profit & Loss Analysis

The company would be best served if all this information was compiled into one congruent system that will allow the department to project sales by drawing information from one source.

Employees of the department must rely on paper copies to review and research on past marketing research, marketing plans and design awards. Each staff member of the sales force is responsible for maintaining his own SEPARATE customer record, which may result in inconclusive reports to corporate as to sales and budget usage. This is also resulting in a disjointed approach to marketing which similar companies have found as an ineffective means of maintaining numbers for sales. Additional statistics as to the number of units produced of each item by shift, which can be combined to the product group and year of production. Interfacing these figures with inventory and sales will further increase efficiency of the department. Sales and Marketing in conjunction with finance and production need to maintain the profit and loss statement by utilizing a networking system that will automatically update the respective database by item and group. In closing, the department desires a system that will create and maintain a marketing budget based on past performance. The ultimate result would be a system that would assist the department in having immediate access to data that shows its participants where they are in regards to budget and projected outcomes.

The Finance and Administration department currently relies on each individual department to compile information to be transferred to them by the end of the ...