Designit is a small company providing design consultancy to a limited number of large clients. The business is mature and fairly stable year on year. It has 30 employees and is privately owned by its founder. Designit prepares an annual fixed budget. The company’s accounts department consists of one part-qualified accountant who has a heavy workload. He prepares the budget using spreadsheets. The company has a November year end.
Designit pays each of its three sales managers an annual salary of $150,000, plus an individual bonus based on sales targets set at the beginning of the year. There are always two levels of bonus that can be earned, based on a lower and an upper level of fee income. For the year ended 30 November 2012, for example, each of the sales managers was given a lower target of securing $1·5m of fee income each, to be rewarded by an individual bonus equating to 20% of salary. If any of the managers secured a further $1·5m of fee income, their bonus would increase by 5% to the upper target of 25%. None of the managers achieved the upper target but all of them achieved the lower one.
This is the same every year and Designit finds that often the managers secure work from several major clients early in the year and reach the $1·5m target well before the year has ended. They then make little effort to secure extra fees for the company, knowing that it would be almost impossible to hit the second target. This, together with a few other problems that have arisen, has made the company consider whether its current budgeting process could be improved and whether the bonus scheme should also be changed.
Designit is now considering replacing the fixed budget with a monthly rolling budget, which Designit believes will make the budgeting process more relevant and timely and encourage managers to focus on the future rather than the past. It would also prevent the problem of targets being met too early on in the year by the sales managers because the targets would be set for monthly performance rather than annual performance. For example, a manager could be given a target of securing $200,000 fee income in the first month for a reward of 2% of salary. Then, depending on what is happening both within the business and in the economy as a whole, at the end of the first month, a different target fee income could be set for the second month.
Required:
(a) Explain what a monthly rolling budget is and how it would operate at Designit. (4 marks)
(b) Discuss the problems that may be encountered if Designit decides to introduce monthly rolling budgets together with a new bonus scheme, such as the one outlined above. (6 marks)
(c) Discuss the problems with the current bonus scheme and, assuming that the company decides against introducing rolling budgets, describe and justify an alternative, more effective bonus scheme that could be introduced. (6 marks)
(d) Discuss the risk of using the company accountant’s own spreadsheets for budgeting. (4 marks)