Case study report: Discuss how financial resources can be utilised to improve business performance. For this assignment, you must select and research
Assignment Description
Case study report: Discuss how financial resources can be utilised to improve business performance.
For this assignment, you must select and research one of the following publicly-traded UK businesses:
- Howdens Joinery
- Greggs
- Tesco
- John Lewis
You will need to gather information on their financial statement (from their annual report), analyse this material to make sense of their expenditure and performance, compare and contrast them to their competitors (for example looking at their relative industry performance), and consider what factors may be likely to affect their performance in the future. In addition, you are expected to provide recommendations for how your chosen business could deploy its resources more effectively to improve its performance, relying on appropriate theory to support this.
Report Structure:
Introduction and case background (Guide: 300 words) This section must introduce your chosen business. You should be able to provide a brief overview of the business, including their current financial position, and provide basic background information necessary to understand their business model. Remember this report aims to discuss how financial resources can be utilised to improve business performance. Therefore you may wish to engage with financial theory to show the link between the use of financial resources and business performance.
Main Body (Guide: 1250 words)
- What are financial resources, and what financial resources does your chosen business have access to?
- Analyse the current performance of your case study business. What do the financials and details you can find tell you?
- Utilise appropriate analytical tools. You will want to engage with basic financial ratios to analyse performance and be able to comment on profit/loss over time.
- Identify examples of capital expenditure. What were they used for? What impact did they have on financial performance?
- Based on current performance, what would the business’ future look like? How does their performance compare to direct competitors?
- Can you make recommendations of how to deploy financial resources more effectively to improve the business performance?
- Remember to include key theory to support your analysis.
Conclusion (Guide: 200 words)
- Summarise your report by informing the reader what you have covered.
Module Learning Outcomes
To be successful in the module students should be able to:
LO3: Apply a range of financial techniques to make business decisions
