The Organic Bread Company (OBC) makes a range of breads for sale direct to the public. The production process begins with workers weighing out ingredients on electronic scales and then placing them in a machine for mixing. A worker then manually removes the mix from the machine and shapes it into loaves by hand, after which the bread is then placed into the oven for baking.
All baked loaves are then inspected by OBC’s quality inspector before they are packaged up and made ready for sale. Any loaves which fail the inspection are donated to a local food bank.
The standard cost card for OBC’s ‘Mixed Bloomer’, one of its most popular loaves, is as follows:
Budgeted production of Mixed Bloomers was 1,000 units for the quarter, although actual production was only 950 units. The total actual quantities used and their actual costs were:
Required:
(a) Calculate the total material mix variance and the total material yield variance for OBC for the last quarter. (7 marks)
(b) Using the information in the question, suggest THREE possible reasons why an ADVERSE MATERIAL YIELD variance could arise at OBC. (3 marks)
Section A暂缺
Section B – ALL FIVE questions are compulsory and MUST be attempted
The Chemical Free Clean Co (C Co) provides a range of environmentally-friendly cleaning services to business customers, often providing a specific service to meet a client’s needs. Its customers range from large offices and factories to specialist care wards at hospitals, where specialist cleaning equipment must be used and regulations adhered to. C Co offers both regular cleaning contracts and contracts for one-off jobs. For example, its latest client was a chain of restaurants which employed them to provide an extensive clean of all their business premises after an outbreak of food poisoning.
The cleaning market is very competitive, although there are only a small number of companies providing a chemical free service. C Co has always used cost-plus pricing to determine the prices which it charges to its customers but recently, the cost of the cleaning products C Co uses has increased. This has meant that C Co has had to increase its prices, resulting in the loss of several regular customers to competing service providers.
The finance director at C Co has heard about target costing and is considering whether it could be useful at C Co.
Required:
(a) Briefly describe the main steps involved in deriving a target cost. (3 marks)
(b) Explain any difficulties which may be encountered and any benefits which may arise when implementing target costing at C Co. (7 marks)
You are a senior manager in Bunk & Co, a global audit firm with offices in more than 30 countries. You are responsible for monitoring audit quality and ethical situations which arise in relation to audit clients. Wire Co is an audit client whose operations involve haulage and distribution. The audit report for the financial statements of Wire Co for the year ended 31 December 2014 was issued last week. You are conducting a review of the quality of that audit, and of any ethical issues which arose in relation to it. Relevant information obtained from a discussion with Lester Freeman, the audit engagement partner, is given below.
(a) Wire Co’s audit committee refused to agree to an increase in audit fees despite the company’s operations expanding into new locations. In response to this, the materiality level was increased during the audit, and some review procedures were not carried out. To reduce sample sizes used in tests of detail, the samples were selected based on judgement rather than statistical methods. In addition, only parts of the population being tested were sampled, for example, certain locations were not included in the sample of non-current assets selected for physical verification. (6 marks)
(b) Some of the audit work was performed by an overseas office of Bunk & Co in an ‘off-shoring’ arrangement. This practice is encouraged by Bunk & Co, whose managing partners see it as a way of improving audit efficiency. The overseas office performs the work at a lower cost, and it was largely low-risk, non-judgemental work included in this arrangement for the audit of Wire Co, for example, numerical checks on documentation. In addition, the overseas office read the minutes of board meetings to identify issues relevant to the audit. (5 marks)
(c) In July 2014, Russell Bell, Wire Co’s former finance director, joined Bunk & Co as an audit partner, working in the same office as Lester Freeman. Although Russell was not a member of the audit team, he did update Lester on some business developments which had taken place at the company during the period before he left. Russell held a number of equity shares in Wire Co, which he sold in January 2015. Since joining Bunk & Co, Russell has been developing initiatives to increase the firm’s income. One initiative is that audit team members should be encouraged to cross-sell non-audit services and references to targets for the cross-selling of non-audit services to audit clients is now included in partner and employee appraisal documentation. (9 marks)
Required:
Comment on the quality control, ethical and professional issues raised in respect of the audit of Wire Co and the firm-wide policies of Bunk & Co, and recommend any actions to be taken by the audit firm.
Note: The split of the mark allocation is shown against each of the issues above.