Edexcel Business A Level Revision

Organisations often need to adapt to their culture for reasons including takeovers or mergers, growth and changes in the market. Difficulties with changing the culture include staff loyalty to exisiting relationships, the failure to accept the need for change, insecurity, loss of power, loss of skills, break-up of work groups and different individual views of how the change should be managed.  Furthermore, there can be an alienation of suppliers, customers and other stakeholders.

Whilst budgets are widely used to in business, you should appreciate that they have some important limitations. In particular: Budgets are only as good as the data being used to create them . Inaccurate or unreasonable assumptions can quickly make a budget unrealistic Budgets can lead to inflexibility in decision-making Budgets need to be changed as circumstances change , for example sales figures can be affected by many variables in demand such as changes in tastes, the actions of a competitor and so on. Budgeting is a time consuming process – in large businesses, whole departments are sometimes dedicated to budget setting and control. This has an associated OPPORTUNITY COST Budgets can result in short term decisions to keep within the budget rather than the right long term decision which exceeds the budget Managers can become too preoccupied with setting and reviewing budgets and forgetting to focus on the real issues of winning customers Costs covere...

Sales forecast - is an estimation of future sales that may be based on previous sales figures, sales volumes, trends, market surveys and trends or managerial estimates. The purpose of this for the following categories are: Finance Inform cash-flow forecasts i.e. how much money can the business expect to flow in from sales.(sales will directly affect cash inflow and so any change in future sales will alter the cash flow and so any change in future sales will alter the cash flow forecast and the level and availability of working capital) Predict sales volume and sales revenue Assess ability to break-even Help set budgets (if sales are forecasted to increase, the business will need to increase departmental budgets for production and distribution) Profit and Loss forecast (future sales will have a direct bearing on this) People Plan workforce needs for: Sales team Seasonal staff in stores or distribution Peak times Operatives to ensure supply meets demand (the...