West Chester University

ACC 303 - Spring 2018

Master Budget Problem

Ginger LLC makes two products identified as G1 and G2. Selected data for 2018 follow:

Ginger uses direct labor-hours to apply overhead. Each year the company determines the overhead application rate for the year based on the budgeted output for the year. The company maintains negligible work in process inventory and expects the cost per unit for both beginnning and ending finished product inventories to be identical.

West Chester University

ACC 303 - Spring 2018

Master Budget Problem

Other Information:

All sales are made on credit. The credit sales collection pattern is as follows:

All raw material purchases are made on account. The payment pattern is as follows:

The company pays direct labor, factory overheads and selling, general & administrative expenses in the periods incurred.

Forecasted income taxes are presumed to be paid in December of each year.

Company policy requires that a minimum cash balance of $50,000 be maintained at all times. Repayments of the company line of credit ar made in $10,000 increments. The company owed $750,000 on the line of credit at December 31, 2017.

The cash balance at December 31, 2017 was $50,000

Required: Prepare and Excel spreadsheet that contains the following schedules por statement for 2018.

Use a separate tab (worksheet) for each schedule.

1. Sales Budget

2. Production budget

3. Direct materials purchases budget (units & dollars)

4. Direct labor budget

5. Factory overhead budget

6. Cost of goods sold & ending finished goods inventory budgets

7. Selling and administrative budget

8. Budgeted income statement

9. Cash budget

COMPANY LAW FOR ACCOUNTANTS:

Word limit: 1,000 words total!

QUESTION 1:

Dimyou Ltd is an electronics business making dimmer switches for lights recently incorporated by Alan and Karen, who were previously in a business partnership together. Both are directors and each holds half the shares in the company.

A) Before Dimyou Ltd was registered as a company Karen signed a lease ‘for and on behalf of Dimyou Ltd’ for factory premises that the company no longer needs. Advise Alan and Karen whether the company is bound by the contract, and if not whether Alan or Karen have any liability for it.

B) Karen is the director responsible for Health and Safety in the company. If she were to be injured in an accident at the company factory, would Karen be able to claim against the company? If Alan had not bought the correct insurance policy for the company, could Karen claim against Alan?

C) Alan and Karen have offered Nick the opportunity to invest in the company to raise capital. He will get a third of the shares in the company, leaving him equal with Alan and Karen, but Nick also wants to be a director and asks that the articles of association be changed to say that he will be director for life. Advise Nick whether this will be effective in ensuring he will be a director, and what else could be done to ensure he is made a director.

D) Dimyou Ltd borrowed £20,000 from Bigbank on 1^st February secured by a floating charge over the business and all its assets. On 1^st March they borrowed £10,000 from Midbank secured by what the documents say is a fixed charge over the company book debts.

Eric is owed £500 for work done for the company.

Alan has paid himself £5,000 from company funds without explaining the reason for the payment.

Dilli is owed £1,000 for goods supplied to the company under a retention of title clause.

If Dimyou Ltd were to go into insolvency, how might the liquidator distribute the assets of the company?

( UK's LAW )

Q1. Headquartered in Plainfield, Indiana is the Chimney Safety Institute of America which, among other things, certifies Chimney Sweeps. There are three steps to becoming certified: purchase (and study) $515 of books, attend an in-person or online review or six-day training school (each of which is several hundred to over a thousand dollars), and pass an exam (again, a few hundred dollars). After this, there is an annual $229 certification fee. The website says that being certified proves “you’re one of the best,” and that certification “is the measure of a chimney sweep’s knowledge about the evaluation and maintenance of chimney and venting systems.” Presumably, the CSIA would argue that its certification protects consumers; given the information presented this week, aside from ensuring high quality chimney sweeps, why else might existing chimney sweeps find it in their interest to protect the certification system? Select one:

a. The certification system encourages the entry of chimney sweeps into the industry since it weeds out sellers who are only interested in making a quick profit. The stature of having a certification is attractive to potential entrepreneurs, and the supply of chimney sweep services (and the labor supply of chimney sweeps) is increased by having the certification system.

b. Currently-certified chimney sweeps have unique knowledge to accurately judge the subtle characteristics of chimney design that most consumers would never notice, but that still affect the longevity of their chimneys. Without the certification system, consumers would consistently be ripped off by chimney sweeps without this knowledge.

c. The certification system is effectively a barrier to entry which hinders new chimney sweeps from competing with established chimney sweeps; the supply of chimney sweep labor and chimney sweep services is thereby decreased, and prices and profit are higher than would exist in a more open, competitive market.

d. Most certification is done for occupations that sell physical goods, not services like chimney sweeping. The entry-barrier problem with occupational licensing only applies to sellers of physical goods, not services, so certified chimney sweeps support the certification system since it encourages competitiveness in their industry, which benefits them and consumers alike.

Q2. What side effects might the (one-time and annual) fees, training, and exam introduce into the chimney sweep market?

Select one:

a. The fees, training, and exam are more likely to exclude low-income entrepreneurs from earning income by being a chimney sweep. It may (slightly) exacerbate income inequality since only higher-income individuals would consider the fees, training, and exam to be affordable, who thereafter would be able to earn income as a chimney sweep.

b. The low fee helps to ensure that uncertified chimney sweeps will not enter the market and attempt to sell high-priced chimney sweep services to compete with the lower-priced products of certified chimney sweeps. The fees, training, and exam help to prevent new entrants from exercising too much market power.

c. The fee and exam are going to encourage only serious entrepreneurs to become chimney sweeps. Those who do not really want to become chimney sweeps will be dissuaded by the requirements, thus ultimately improving the quality and lowering the price of chimney sweep services for consumers.

d. Being known as a certified chimney sweep, who passed an exam, will improve the reputation of certified chimney sweeps. The fee payments, however, do nothing to affect the chimney sweep's reputation. Since both the exam, training, and fees are mandatory, it is unclear whether the requirements will improve the quality and lower the price of chimney sweep services in Louisiana.

Q3.  You may be familiar with stories (even from your own experience) of employees who choose to denigrate or subtly sabotage their fellow employees rather than focusing on how they themselves can be better or more productive. Often, a company may notice not that a single employee behaves this way, but that many, most, or all of them do. It seems obvious that spending time and energy figuring out how to make other employees appear worse, instead of spending that time and energy to make yourself better, is harmful to the company, but the behavior continues to be seen among large groups of workers. How might game theory offer an explanation for this behavior?

Select one:

a. The behavior is a result of a prisoners' dilemma. An employee finds that his own position is improved if a fellow employee appears worse, regardless of whether the fellow employee engages in that sabotaging behavior or not. While it is best for everyone (and the company) overall to not have any of that behavior occur, the result is that it will happen frequently because it is in each employee's individual best interest to sabotage.

b. An employee will engage in sabotaging behavior because doing so is a one-shot game. The employee knows that it will only take a single instance of a fellow employee appearing to be negligent to get that fellow employee fired, so the sabotaging employee will remain hired but with fewer fellow employees with which to compete.

c. The sabotaging behavior is a dominated strategy that always harms the company and the employees. Since it continues to occur, though, then employees have failed to eliminate it as a strategy, and since it hasn't been eliminated, it becomes the most likely outcome.

d. The sabotaging behavior is the result of a sequential game, where the employees attempt to be the "first mover" and be the first to sabotage their fellow employees. If a fellow employee is the first one to appear worse to the managers (and I am thus the first one to appear better to the managers), then if I am a later victim of sabotage by my fellow employee, the manager won't think as badly of me since it happened later in time.

Pick 3 and answer

If you were evaluating an investment opportunity, which technique would you use and why?

When evaluating investments, you can get data from engineering, marketing, and sometimes accounting. Do you think any of these organizations have internal biases? If so, as a member of the finance department, how would you deal with them?

You have just discovered that your boss favors payback in evaluating investments. Should you try to talk him out of it or should you go along with his/her desires?

You are comptroller for your company. The CEO is a savvy individual with great instincts for the business. She strongly favors an investment that is only marginally acceptable at best. She has asked you to put together a justification for it. What will you do?

Last year your company financed its investments by selling shares of common stock. This year the plan is to use debt. The after-tax cost of debt is 5%, the cost of equity is 12% and the weighted average cost of capital is 9.5%. The first investment for this year is an expansion project. What cost of capital will you use and why?

For the situations presented, describe the recommendations the internal auditors should make to prevent the following problems.      

Situation 1: Many employees of a firm that manufactures small tools pocket some of the tools for their personal use. Since the quantities taken by any one employee are immaterial, the individual employees do not consider the act as fraudulent or detrimental to the company. The company is now large enough to hire an internal auditor. One of the first things she did was to compare the gross profit rates for industrial tools to the gross profit for personal tools. Noting a significant difference, she investigated and uncovered the employee theft.

Situation 2: A manufacturing firm’s controller created a fake subsidiary. He then ordered goods from the firm’s suppliers, told them to ship the goods to a warehouse he rented, and approved the vendor invoices for payment when they arrived. The controller later sold the diverted inventory items, and the proceeds were deposited to the controller’s personal bank account. Auditors suspected something was wrong when they could not find any entries regarding this fake subsidiary office in the property, plant, and equipment ledgers or a title or lease for the office in the real-estate records of the firm

Kolkmeyer Manufacturing Company is considering adding two machines to its manufacturing operation. This addition will bring the number of machines to nine. The president of Kolkmeyer asked for a study of the need to add a second employee to the repair operation. The arrival rate is 0.06 machines per hour for each machine, and the service rate for each individual assigned to the repair operation is 0.6 machines per hour.

a. Compute the operating characteristics if the company retains the single-employee repair operation. If required, round your answers to four decimal places.

P₀ =

Lq=

L=

W_{q= _______hours}

_{W=    ______hours}       

b. Compute the operating characteristics if a second employee is added to the machine repair operation. If required, round your answers to four decimal places.

P₀ =

Lq=

L=

W_{q= _______hours}

_{W=    ______hours}       

Each employee is paid $30 per hour. Machine downtime is valued at $70 per hour. From an economic point of view, should one or two employees handle the machine repair operation? Explain. If required, round your answers to two decimal places.

Cost of one employee system: $_____

Cost of two employees system: $_____

Afirmthatproducesaccessoriesforsmartphoneshiredamarketingresearchcompany to find out how much its customers are willing to pay for its cases and screen protectors. The marketing research company found that there are only three types of customers with the following willingess to pay for cases and screen protectors:

Customer A Customer B Customer C

Case $3.25 $8.25 $10.00

Screen Protector $6.00 $3.25 $10.00

Bundle $9.25 $11.50 $20.00

As we did in class, assume that there is only one consumer of each type and that each consumer buys at most one case and one screen protector. Assume also that the marginal cost of production is zero.

(a)If the firm were to charge only individual prices (separate pricing), what prices should it set for its cases and screen protectors to maximize profit? What is the firm’s profit?

(b)After conducting a costly study, an outside consultant claims that the company could make more money from its customers if it sold cases and screen protectors together as a bundle instead of separately (pure bundling). Is the consultant right?

(c)Could you suggest a mixed-bundling pricing strategy that could beat (a) and (b)? Explain.

1. A company has $1,301 in inventory, $4,728 in net fixed assets, $598 in accounts receivable, $254 in cash, $538 in accounts payable, and $5,323 in equity. What is the company's long-term debt?

2. You find the following financial information about a company: net working capital = $1,113; fixed assets = $6,281; total assets = $8,638; and long-term debt = $4,645. What are the company's total liabilities?

14. (3)

The tax rates are as shown below:

Your firm currently has taxable income of $80,800. How much additional tax will you owe if you increase your taxable income by $22,000?

Which one of the following statements is correct?

Multiple Choice

• A general partnership is legally the same as a corporation.

• Income from both sole proprietorships and partnerships that is taxable is treated as individual income.

• Partnerships are the most complicated type of business to form.

• All business organizations have bylaws.

• Only firms organized as sole proprietorships have limited lives.

Kolkmeyer Manufacturing Company is considering adding two machines to its manufacturing operation. This addition will bring the number of machines to nine. The president of Kolkmeyer asked for a study of the need to add a second employee to the repair operation. The arrival rate is 0.06 machines per hour for each machine, and the service rate for each individual assigned to the repair operation is 0.6 machines per hour.

a. Compute the operating characteristics if the company retains the single-employee repair operation. If required, round your answers to four decimal places.

P₀ =

Lq=

L=

W_{q= _______hours}

_{W=    ______hours}       

b. Compute the operating characteristics if a second employee is added to the machine repair operation. If required, round your answers to four decimal places.

P₀ =

Lq=

L=

W_{q= _______hours}

_{W=    ______hours}       

Each employee is paid $30 per hour. Machine downtime is valued at $70 per hour. From an economic point of view, should one or two employees handle the machine repair operation? Explain. If required, round your answers to two decimal places.

Cost of one employee system: $_____

Cost of two employees system: $_____

You are attempting to determine whether you are taller or shorter than the average student currently enrolled in your university. You have just learned about sampling and have decided to sample students to determine the average height at your university.

Required: What are some advantages and disadvantages of using sampling to answer this question as opposed to examining the entire population? Give some other examples of when you would be more likely to use sampling (applied to this particular example) as opposed to examining the entire population. In what cases might you want to examine the entire population?