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 5. Communicate with Stakeholders
Additional Scenario
You have successfully prepared the budget for the financial year 2021/2022. As per the company’s procedures, the budget must be approved by the stakeholders before its implementation.
Your Task:
In this activity, you will act as the business manager, and you are responsible for obtaining approval for the budget. You need to write an email to the company CEO, Senior manager and company accountant and discuss the budgets prepared in activity 4 and also select the best option for the new accounting system.
Email template
Download Email template
You need to perform the following taskensuring you cover all of the below points:
·
Provide the overview of the budget to all the stakeholders prepared in activity 4
·
Distribute the following budgets to all the stakeholders during the meeting(prepared in activity 4):
o
sales and profit budget
o
GST cash flow budget
·
Discuss the major reasons for the previous year profits and losses.
·
Discuss the assumptions made within the budget.
·
Examine and discuss the critical dates and initiatives in the business plan and cash flow trends.
·
Identify and discuss thereporting requirements for each quarter.
·
Discuss how to implement and monitor the budget expenditure on a regular basis.
·
Clearly provide information about the financial delegations of Senior Manager and company accountant for budget implementation.
·
Confirm there are no misappropriation of funds in the financial statements.
·
Analyse the functionality of the current software and its suitability for financial management
·
Discuss and select thebest option for the new accounting systemto improve the productivity of the financial system.
·
Engage in discussion with the stakeholders(CEO, Senior manager and company accountant ) and provide them with the answer to the following questions:
·
o
What are the current statutory requirements for tax compliance?
o
Which is the most suitable commercially available financial-management accounting software for Career Training?
o
What are the implications of probity in the preparation and revision of budgets?
o
What are the critical dates and initiatives that will require or generate resources for Career Training in the next financial cycle?
o
What other items do you think should be included in the budgets for the company?
o
What internal controls should be implemented to improve risk management for maintaining audit trials?