Question

For the past 5 years, Shirin Nadia has been working as a Management Accountant at Meridian Energy – a leading power company based in New Zealand. However, she has recently seen a job advertisement for a Senior Management Accountant at Auckland Museum. Shirin applied for the position and subsequently progressed towards the final interview stage. While she was going through the final interview process, an interview panel member asked her how the performance report of Auckland Museum would be different from Meridian Energy (i.e., her current employer). Imagine yourself as Shirin and write down your response to the panel member’s question

Answer 1

The basic difference between the Auckland Museum and Meridian Energy is that while Auckland Museum is a non-profit organisation, Meridian Energy is a business organisation formed with the purpose of generating profit from business. The performance report of Auckland Museum would therefore, be altogether different from that of an energy company like Meridian Energy. A museum is a building or place where works of art, and other objects of historic, cultural or scientific value are kept and displayed. The purpose of a museum is primarily to promote education, research and cultural awareness. The purpose of a business is primarily to maximize shareholders' satisfaction by conducting its business in an efficient and profitable manner. While there is no mention about profits in the performance report of a museum (there can only be a surplus or deficit, depemding upon the flow of the grants or funds), the performance report of a business always culminates into a bottomline—the profits or losses. While the earnings of a business or distributed among its shareholders, the surplus of a museum is not distributed, it is kept as reserve for use in the years in which there ia a deficit.

The most important performance meterics in the performance report of a museum include:

• No of visitors during the year
• Visitor satisfaction as measured by ratings given by visitors: Auckland Museum has 99% Visitor satisfaction with 71% rating the Museum experience as ‘Excellent'
• No. of objects added to the museum during the year
• Number of research projects aided or directed
• Optimum utilization of grants received from Govt. and philonthropic organizations and persons
• Digitzation of rare and old manuscripts for use by scholars, researchers and general public

On the other hands the important performance meterics of an energy company would include Gross Average production, attaining highest efficiency in energy generation, reducing distribution costs, reducing distribution losses, expansion of renewable energy generation, optimizing revenue collection, achieving a reasonable return on capital employed, reducing the environmental impact of operations, using energy efficient technologies, etc.