Faculty: Business and IT

Exeter College BTEC Assignment Brief

Course Title

BTEC Level 3 National Extended Diploma in Business

Assignment Title
Assignment 2

Unit Number and Title
Unit 2 – Business Resources

Hand out date –
27th February 2015 9am

Hand in date
13th March 2015 4.30pm

Lecturer
Brian Evans

Scenario/Vocational Context:
You have been working as a Junior Financial Advisor and your supervisor, Trevor Beddington, is absolutely delighted with the support you provide to clients. In fact, he thinks you are ready for promotion and gives you a task to see if you are ready for the job.
Your first task is providing financial advice to a new client, EDF Energy. They are a leading energy supplier in the UK and Europe. They are keen to get some professional advice to support them in raising finance for the business.

Learning Outcomes:

3. Know how to access sources of finance
4 Be able to interpret financial statements

Student Name:

Faculty: Business and IT

Assignment Brief - Tasks

Course Title
BTEC Level 3 National Extended Diploma in Business
Unit
Unit 2 – Business Resources

Introduction:
See introduction to tasks below

Assignment Tasks

Criteria
Task 1
In order to provide advice to EDF Energy, produce a poster presentation which describe sources of internal and external finance for their business Hand in Date:

P4
Task 2
EDF are looking for advice on the financial management of their business. They want to know more about costs and budgets and would benefit from your advice and guidance. With this in mind, you decide to put together some information on costing and budgeting to be presented to them at an upcoming meeting.
You will need to create a PowerPoint presentation and hand-out for the meeting

Illustrate, with examples, the different types of costs that EDF is likely to incur and the reasons for keeping those costs under control. Include an explanation of break-even analysis and the role it plays in the financial planning of their business.
Illustrate, with examples, the use of budgets, their purpose and how they can be used to monitor and control the performance of EDF Energy.
Include a description of the budget-setting process, the monitoring of actual performance against budget and the use of variance analysis.
(This provides evidence for P6)

In you presentation you will need to include an analysis of the reasons why costs need to be controlled to budget

(This provides evidence for M4)

Your conclusion in the presentation needs to evaluate problems they would experience from unmonitored costs and budgets. Include potential consequences for the company of variances from budgets
(This provides evidence for D3)

Hand in Date:

Task 3

Your manager has asked you to send him a report with an evaluation of how managing resources and controlling budgets can improve the performance of a business.

Using EDF as an example explain the ways in which the management of human, physical and technological resources as well as the control of costs through budgets can improve their business.

You may wish to consider improvements in relation to the following:
Sales and profits
Customer base
Levels of employee and customer satisfaction
Staff turnover
Levels of efficiency
(This provides evidence for D1)

Task 4
EDF have contacted you as they are keen to get some additional advice on how their business is performing and whether they are in a strong enough position to expand their business.
You have been supplied with copies of their profit and loss accounts and balance sheets and you are to provide them with a straightforward report on the company’s performance.
Within your report provide an interpretation of the contents of the trading and profit and