I. Title;
Best Practices to Improve Performance through Strategic Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Case
Prepare a flexible and master budget for Ford Motor Company, a Fortune 100 manufacturing company, from Ford's SEC 10K report.
II. Introduction
In this Master and Flexible Budget Comprehensive Case assume you have worked as a corporate accountant and created financial statements as part of a SEC 10-K report for a Fortune 500 company. From that experience and other opportunities as a corporate accountant, you gained the confidence to apply to and be hired by a Fortune 100 company. Your current position is in the budgeting department where you will prepare flexible budgets for a based on a hypothetical case.
Throughout this case, you may share your progress with not only your professor, but also with your classmates. Your professor will play the role of the controller with whom you discuss various issues and submit draft documents for approval in advance of submitting your final documents. Only the final submission will be graded.
To successfully complete this Case, you must demonstrate your knowledge of and ability to complete the following goals and competencies:
Goal 1: Communication: Learners demonstrate ability to communicate clearly both orally and in writing.
o Competencies:
- 1.1 Organize document or presentation clearly in a manner that promotes understanding
- 1.2 Develop coherent paragraphs or points so that each is internally unified and so that each functions as part of the whole document or presentation
- 1.3 Provide sufficient, correctly cited support that substantiates the writer's ideas
- 1.4 Tailor communications to the audience
- 1.5 Use sentence structure appropriate to the task, message and audience
- 1.6 Follow conventions of Standard Written English
Goal 2: Critical Thinking: Learners demonstrate ability to apply logical, systematic decision-making processes to formulate clear, defensible ideas and to draw ethical conclusions.
o Competencies:
- 2.1 Articulate and frame the issue
- 2.2 Collect and evaluate information
- 2.3 Evaluate the underlying causes or conditions of elements contributing to an issue
- 2.4 Use systems thinking to arrive at a decision in the context of an issue
- 2.5 Apply ethical principles when determining actions.
Goal 3: Quantitative Reasoning: Learners demonstrate the ability to use mathematical operations and analytical concepts and operations to address problems and to inform decision-making
o Competency
- 3.1 Construct models that represent real-world problems or processes
- 3.2 Develop visible representation of data
- 3.3 Analyze data using mathematical/algebraic operations
- 3.4 Use calculated results to inform the problem or process
Goal 4: Leadership, Facilitation, and Collaboration: Learners lead, facilitate, and collaborate with a variety of individuals and diverse teams to achieve organizational objectives.
o Competency
- 4.1 Demonstrate an ability to plan a particular objective or goal
Goal 5: Functional Competencies in Cost and Managerial Accounting
o Competencies:
- 5.1 Measurement and reporting: Assign costs to firm's activities
- 5.2 Analyze and interpret business information: evaluate cost behaviors
- 5.3 Measurement and reporting: Prepare a master budget for a service or manufacturing company
- 5.4 Decision Making: Assist organizational leaders in understanding financial information, budgets, managerial reports and other analytical tools to support management control and decisions making
- 5.5 Effectively communicate relevant information and analyses based on specific reporting requirements of management. Specifically, you will demonstrate your competencies to:
- Apply cost-volume profit analysis
- Prepare a master and a flexible budget
- Identify key underlying assumptions for a cash budget and budgeted balance sheet
- Build a model using Excel to efficiently change the results when assumptions are changed.
- Use publicly available industry information to evaluate the reasonableness of those assumptions
- Defend the basic assumptions used in the master budget based on publicly available economic and industry reports
- Identify characteristics of an effective budget system
- Address an ethical dilemma
o Competencies:
- 7.2 Analyzing and interpreting: learners demonstrate an applied understanding of how to analyze, plan, manage, and control costs to further support organizational strategies.
- 7.3 Measurement and reporting: learners demonstrate an applied understanding of business planning, budgeting, and costs forecasting to prepare a business plan congruent with an organization's strategic plans.
- 7.6 Benchmarking: learners demonstrate an applied understanding of how to compare organizational processes, procedures, and performance to competitors and industry standards as a means to improve performance and adopt best practices.
After proving your competencies in financial accounting at Retail. com your passion for high fashion shifts from clothes to cars. In your new role as a corporate accountant in the budget department, you are tasked with preparing a master and flexible budget for Ford Motor Company using Microsoft Excel. The controller recommends starting with publicly availablefinancial information from Ford's SEC 10-K in addition to information on industry trends to assess the degree to which management's assumptions are reasonable.
Attachment:- Improve Performance through Strategic Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting Case.xlsx