Accounting for Managers

Question 1:-

Bonza Handtools Ltd. manufactures a popular power drill suitable for the home renovator. Financial and other data for this product for the last twelve months are as follows :

Sales                                                                20000 units

Selling price                                                      $130 per unit

Variable manufacturing cost                              $50 per unit

Fixed manufacturing costs                                      $400000

Variable selling and administrative costs           $30 per unit

Fixed selling and administrative costs                   $300000.

The directors of Bonza Ltd. want to try to increase the profitability of this product and invited senior staff to suggest how this might be done. Three suggestions have been received.

• The accountant, Jan Rossi, believes that a price increase of $10 per unit is the best way to boost profits. She would spend an additional $125000 on national advertising and contends, that if this is done, sales volume would not drop appreciably from last year.

• The production manager, Tom Tune, thinks that an improved quality product could increase sales volume by 25% if accompanied by an advertising campaign costing $50000 aimed at tradespeople as well as home renovators. The improved quality would add $5 per unit to the variable cost. Mr Tune believes that the price should not be increased.

• The sales manager, Mary Watson, wants to undertake a promotion campaign where a $10 rebate is offered on all drills sold during the three months beginning 1 April. Normally 6000 units are sold during that period and Ms Watson believes that this could be boosted to 10000 units if an advertising campaign costing $40000 were launched late in March.

You have been asked by the Bonza board to comment on each of these three proposals. Draft a report in response to this request. You are not asked to make an outright choice, but rather to analyse the potential strengths and weaknesses. The sales volumes forecast by each staff member should be treated as estimates only and your report should examine the effects of variations in actual sales from these forecasts.
Give figures to support your comments and mention qualitative factors that may also be involved.

Question 2

The Tassie Company estimates that next year it will manufacture and sell 150000 units of its product. On the basis of that level of activity, it has budgeted for the following costs and prices per unit:

Direct Material Cost                                          $2.50

Direct Labour Cost                                              3.00

Variable Factory Overhead                                  1.50

Fixed Factory Overhead                                      2.00

Manufacturing Cost                                             9.00

Variable Selling and Administrative Cost           2.00

Fixed Selling and Administrative Cost               1.50

Total Cost                                                          12.50

20% Mark-up                                                       2.50

Selling Price                                                     $15.00

The Company has an opportunity to bid for the supply of an additional 40000 units of its product to a government department. No sales commission (variable selling and admin. cost) is involved and no additional fixed costs will be incurred.

Give a reasoned opinion on the level of the bid that should be made in each of the following two circumstances:

(a) The capacity of the Tassie Company's factory is 200,000 units per year.

(b) The capacity of the factory is only 180,000 units per year.

Question 3

Critically discuss the following statements: Word limit for Question 3 - 750 words

• ‘a budget is a forecast of what is expected to happen in a business during the next year'

• ‘budgets are okay but they stifle all initiative. No manager would work for a business that applies control through budgets.'

• ‘any sensible person would start with the sales budget and build up the other budgets from there.'

• ‘a budget trying to be realistic will not motivate best performance.'

• ‘only adverse variances are worth investigating, because favourable variances, by definition, must be good.'

Question 4

ABC Ltd makes trailers. It receives a special order to produce 350 trailers for a local retail outlet. The order will take 2,100 kg of material that costs $16.10 per kg and will require 1,400 direct labour hours and 525 machine hours. The following are the expected/budgeted annual costs for ABC Ltd:

Direct labour                                       $327,600

Direct labour hours                             25,795

Direct materials                                   $193,200

Indirect costs                                      $98,400

Machine hours                                     9,840

Required:

1. Calculate the overhead allocation rate: note that the process is labour-intensive
2. Calculate the total costs of the special order
3. Calculate the cost of the special order if ABC Ltd uses machine time as the basis for allocating overheads
4. Calculate the minimum price per trailer that ABC Ltd could accept.
5. Explain how segmented overhead cost pools and activity based costing can assist accurate costing for pricing purpose (200 words)