Sources of Internal and External Finance for Marks and Spencer

The main source of data presented in this paper is the official website of Marks and Spencer. The details of links are provided at the end of this paper under the title of References.

Marks and Spencer has many external forces that affect the company. These are known as macro environmental factors. There are six of these forces, Political, Economic, Sociological, Technological, Legal and Environmental factors. These external factors affect the types of products/services Marks and Spencer offers, the nature of its market positioning and strategies, there relationship with their customers and their suppliers. These external factors allow Marks and Spencer to develop:

Sources of cash: Sales of depreciable assets and sales of discontinued operations in 1990 and increasingly from operating activities, especially related to restructuring and other unusual items.

The internal analysis of the company paints a picture of a firm that is well endowed with resources, both human and capital. The company boasts of an asset base of $11.4 billion according to the financial reports for the year 2012. This is huge, and it shows that the company is well grounded and has the capacity to gain a competitive edge in the highly competitive retail market in which it operates (Britton & Jorissen, 2007).

Profits earned or losses incurred by the corporation. Profits retained belong to the common shareholders and the share value increases accordingly.

assets to fund operations and pay expenses. Continued low sales and limited assets is a

Budget controls are very time consuming, it is a process that requires a lot of time to understand and adopt into ASDA’s business plan. The time these employees invest into the budgeting process hinders them from carrying out their other assigned roles and responsibilities.

This research paper is a brief discussion of budget management analysis. Budgeting is the key to financial management, and is the key to translates an organization goals or plan into money. Budgeting is a rough estimate of how much a company will need to get their work done, and provides the basis for evaluating performance, a source of motivation, coordinating business activities, a tool for management communication and instructions to employees. Without a budget an organization would be like a driver, driving blinded without instructions or any sense of direction, that’s how important a budget is to every organization and individual likewise (Clark, 2005).

The current assets are those which are readily convertible into cash and cash equivalents due to their highly liquid nature and also form part of working capital of the company’s operations. However, the long term assets in contrast are not liquid because since they have a useful life of more than a year and hence their full value cannot be easily realized within

We have all been there – running short of money. Sometimes we spend without being aware of what we have in our accounts, and that usually seems to be the time when extra or emergency expenses occur. In this paper, I will answer the following five questions pertaining to “the Case of Overdrawn, Overwrought, and Over Her Head”.

Most entities and organization create budgets as a guide for controlling its spending, prediction of profit, and it expenditure as they progress toward a set goal. Budget involves pulling resources together to achieve a specific goal. According to Gapenski (2006), budgeting is an offshoot in a planning process. A basic managerial accounting tool use in holding planning and control functions together is referred to as set of budgets (p. 255). One major setback manager or budget developer encounter is trying to design a future, a process that cannot be created with the precision just right. This article highlights some financial management

Budgeting is crucial in the well-being of a company especially the financial health status of a company. In fact, no professionally managed firm would fail to budget, since the budget establishes what is authorized, how to plan for purchasing contracts and hiring, and indicates how much financing is needed to support planned activity. It is routine for a company to budget for its expenses. Expense budgets act as a guideline of how much revenue a company would require keeping the activities running. It is used to set the company’s targets for a certain period.

This type of business seems to be sole proprietor and the financial structure of this firm has maximum number of inventories and zero level of debt financing. Most of the drug retailers usually have a large amount of inventories due to any emergency situation and demand for the medicines is usually high. In this case the high asset turnover shows that the firm is effectively doing business by selling off its assets which in this case is medicines to generate more and more cash.

The 20’s century saw the use of budget involve due to a change in the environment. Indeed the control of output used to be obtained by the dissemination of tasks and so traditional budgets were very much highlighted, with a significant top-down influence. As an example of the importance of budget in the 1970’s IBM had about 3,000 people involved in their budgetary process. During the same period, the oil crisis brought concerns about rising in costs and led to the introduction of zero-based budgeting (ZBB), which can lower cost by avoiding blanket increases or decreases to a prior period’s budget. The increase in business uncertainties was in discrepancy with the stifling effect of fixed plans, promoting the use of rolling budgets. The 1990’s saw the growing influence of shareholders and steered the focus on a budget that included a wider view of organisation results, answering the investment community for quarterly updates on results and expectations (Bill Ryan, 2005). Budgets then started being used as a communication tool between the financial community and the organisation, allowing the corporation to be integrated in the capital market. Moreover companies started using flexible budgets rather than static budgets as nowadays various levels of activities can be observed in most organisations. The use of flexible budgets then enables firms to be consistent with their new environment and the market.

The early 1990 's marked the beginning of a sea change in customer 's expectations with regard to good quality, healthy food. M&S image as a respectable retailer with its focus on providing a wide range of premium foods meant that the M&S brand, where food was concerned, became regarded as something of a luxury.