Case Study
Career Training is a private registered training organisation (RTO) based in Geraldton, Western Australia. Career Training is recognised as an industry training leader delivering nationally recognised and specialised courses. Registered training organisations (RTOs) are the training providers registered by ASQA (or, in some cases, a state regulator) to deliver nationally recognised vocational education and training (VET) services.
Career Training provides qualifications in various subject areas, including business, community services, information technology and hospitality. There are currently 400 students enrolled across a wide range of courses. There are 35 staff members, including training staff and administration.
The levels of qualifications provided are as follows:
Certificates I, II, III and IV
Diploma
Advanced Diploma
Career Training follows the important standards of the industry and focuses on supporting informed decisions, engagement and participation. The RTO applies a systematic approach to ensure quality across all training and assessment services, including staff and systems. It seeks feedback from students and internal staff on a monthly basis and conducts internal audits of the company’s policies and procedures to ensure compliance against the standards for registered training organisations.
Context of the Assessment
Computer software requirement
The current accounting information system used by Career Training has not been able to provide adequate and sufficient analysis of its revenue and expenditure that has led to difficulties in making informed estimates of future profits.
The future estimates of the company’s profits are not based on statistical figures and facts. They are merely predictions of top management. The board of directors feel that to have more realistic figures on the company’s future growth and profit, they need to use accounting software to analyse previous years’ results and trends. This will not only help them to identify the future profits but will also help them to expand the business.
So, they have decided to use a new system that can manage the financial information more effectively and have the capabilities to analyse the data and provide realistic statistics to create budgets and forecasts to provide the owner and leadership team with the ability to measure where the company was at and where it is headed financially. The senior management team believe that better information will allow them to prepare for the future, allocate resources more efficiently and improve profit margins.
The senior management wants you to recommend a new system. They have provided you with the guidelines for the selection of the new system. The system must:
comply with all the legislative requirements.
calculate all payroll requirements
prepare information for compliance requirements
track stock, work in progress, orders, jobs and other task management requirements
handle multiple bank accounts and automatically imports and processes bank data
be able to produce separate financial reports for each business or department within the business
easily integrate with other systems you are operating such as online payments, point of sale equipment, customer relationship management records, stock records and payroll software
keep detailed records on clients
allow you to manage permissions so that users only have access to the parts of the system that is relevant to their work
allow users to securely access data remotely (cloud computing)
have no ongoing license fees
They are well aware of the fact that checking the software for the requirements will take time. The new budget is also expected to be projected this month. So, they want this to be done after the preparation of the budget for the year 2021/2022.
Assume that you have been appointed as the Business Manager at Career Training and you need to prepare budgets and establish audit trials for the organisation.
Task 7. (Part B) Review Report
Your task:
In this activity, you will act as the business manager, and you need to prepare a report to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing financial management approaches:
You are required to perform the following tasks by completing the Task 7 Review Report V2Download Task 7 Review Report V2
Analyse Budget variance report & GST Cash Flow Budget variance report (prepared in part A)
Identify the issues based on the information provided within the case study.
Present views on how these issues can be resolved.
Analyse the “Sales and Profit Budgets variance report” identify and prioritise the significant issues, including the financial performance.
Identify variances.
Provide reasons for the variance.
Document the steps that should be taken to maintain gross profit margins after increasing expenses and a downturn in sales.
Check the company’s financial viability by comparing the company’s performance with the industry benchmarks.
Present recommendations about the financial viability for the organisation based on the analysis of the issues given in the case study, the identified reasons and the organisational performance.
Review the financial management process based on your assessment of the issues, reasons and organisational performance. Also, provide recommendations for improvement in improving financial management processes.
Identify and document some of the risks that the company can face in the future based on the audit trial outcomes conducted. Also, identify the risk of misappropriation of funds and document a risk management approach.
You will be required to complete:
You are required to complete the Report on the effectiveness of existing financial-management approaches/finances and submit it to your Trainer/Assessor.