AC-335 – Final Course Project

Spring 2024

Due: May 8th at Midnight

Background:

A new ownership group has recently purchased ABC Graphics. You have been hired by the new
management team to analyze their sales data for the past year and provide them with insights about
their new company that will help their long-term success. Management provided you with sales data,
and some other information related to vendors, employees, products and stores. Being so knew to the
business, Management won’t be of much help outside of this document as their background is real
estate and not retail. Management provided the following requests, all of which must be completed
accurately to obtain full payment (in your case a perfect score).

Managements Request:

 Perform the following five descriptive analytics to help Management understand the business
environment. Management is requested a write-up, between 250-300 words describing what
you found. Appropriate visualizations should be included to back up your claims. (30 points
total, 5 points for the writeup, and 5 points for accuracy of each analysis)
1. Sales dollars by store and product size. Which combination of store and size was the
most popular, what was the least? (5 points)
2. Sales quantity by vendor. Who were the top 5 vendors and bottom 5 vendors from an
overall quantity perspective (5 points)
3. Sales taxes by employee by store. Which employee collected the most sales tax in each
location (5 points)
4. Net Income in Dollars by Store by Month. Which stores were profitable, and which were
not? What month had the highest profit overall across all stores, which month was least
profitable? (5 points)
 Hint: Find the margin of each sale by taking the selling price less the cost (don’t
forget the quantity sold!). Aggregate the total margin for each store by month in
a pivot table. Aggregate the total store costs by month in another pivot table.
Subtract the store costs from the margin to get profit.
5. A Histogram of Profit Margins for each product class. Provide insights into the top bin
for each product (i.e. what is the most common margin for each) (5 points)
 Hint: Use the products data tab. Filter your products by class. Identify the
maximum and minimum margin percentage. Think back to managerial
accounting on how to get a profit margin %. Create a histogram and create bins.
Each bin should be 5% or .05. Chapter 2 labs are a great resource! Bins should
start at a whole number (i.e. 5% or 12% or 18%, not 4.5%, 10.3% etc)

 An anonymous employee left a sticky note on Management’s desk that they believe that
fraudulent and unusual transactions were taking place. Management is requesting that you
 perform the following three analytics to provide insights into the claim. Management is
requesting a write-up, between 250-300 words describing your results. Incorporate the output
from your analytics in the writeup. Does the evidence support that fraud could be taking place?
Yes or no. (25 points total. 5 points for the writeup, and 20 points for the analysis, see
breakdown of points below)
1. Perform a Bedford’s analysis on the total sales value of each record. Create a
visualization of the analysis and describe the results in your own words in your writeup.
Did the data conform? What do the results mean? (5 points)
2. Determine if there are any unusual relationships between Employees and Vendors.
Management expects that all employee should be promoting all products, and as such,
would expect an employee’s transactions to be under 12% for all vendors. For example,
if they found that 15% of an employee’s transactions were selling products from one
vendor that would be a problem. Create a conditionally formatted red-yellow-green (or
something similar) that highlights your results. Did you find any concerning
relationships? If so, who were they between? (10 points)
 Hint: Late chapter 7 labs should be helpful. The “Value” field you are interested
in is the count of “Transaction ID” in the pivot. Vendors should be the row…pick
the column that makes the most sense
3. Perform a gap analysis on Transaction ID. Are there any gaps in transactions? Highlight
your findings. (5 points)

 Management is looking for some forwarding looking information to help them determine the
appropriate direction of the business. They asked that you completed the following analytics
and provide an overview of your results 150-200 words. Provide appropriate visualizations and
tables to support your findings.
1. Perform a break-even analysis by store. How many items does each store have to sell in
order to cover their fixed costs (S&A) for the year?
 Hint: First, find the total profit of each store for the year, and divide it by the
total quantity of goods sold. That will give you the average profit (or margin)
made on each item sold. Use that figure in your break-even analysis. (10 points)
2. Perform a sales forecast for the first quarter of next year for each store. Describe the
trends and offer advice to Management. Are sales expected to increase or decrease?
What are the forecasted sales for last month?(5 points)
 Once you figure out your sales for each store by month, copy and paste your
pivot as “values”. Change the months to numbers, i.e. January =1, February =2.
Chapter 8 labs will be a great resource!

 Management is considering expanding the business to a new state. The choices are NY, SC, and
NV. Management expects to have the following cost of capital for each state: NY – 11.85%, SC –
11.75% and NV – 10.45%. Cash outlays are as follows:

NY – Initial outlay: 1,650,000, increased profit years 1-5: 275K, 350K, 450K, 625K and 650K.

SC – Initial outlay: 2,375,000, increased profits years 1-5: 450K, 525K, 675K, 800K, and 975K.
 NV – Initial outlay: 1,950,000, increased profits years 1-5; 450K, 500K, 525K, 575K, 600K.

1. Perform a NPV analysis on three potential new stores and provide insights into the
following:
 If Management ignored time value of money, which projects would you
recommend they invest in and in what order? Why?
 What project order would you recommend based on NPV calculations? If you
had unlimited funding which projects would you invest in?

Provide an overview of your results 150-200 words and explain which is the best
decision for Management to make. (10 points)

 New changes are coming! Management is looking for some insights on how these changes will
impact the business. Provide an overview of your results in 200-250 words. Incorporate
visualizations in your write-up as needed from your analytics.
1. Sales taxes are currently collected on each sale and remitted to the state government.
TX is currently considering passing a new law that will remove their flat sales tax rate of
8.25% and replace it with a sales tax of 9.50% on adult size clothing and 9.25% on child
size clothing. Lobbyists against the sales tax change argue that raising the sales taxes will
reduce total sales by 5%, and as such if there are less sales dollars there will be less tax
dollars.

Provide Management with insights into the current sales taxes collected in TX for each
product based on the current 8.25% flat tax. Recalculate the new sales tax collected
assuming that the next period sales would be identical this current periods except for
the drop in total sales by 5%. What was the difference in sales tax collected for each
product? Create an appropriate visualization to show what will happen if the new law
goes into effect. (10 points)
 Hint: Make a copy of the data for the state under review only. Calculate sales
taxes at the current levels. Use a formula to create a new sales tax column
based on the information. Recalculate new sales and new taxes collected.

2. Management estimates that it spends $1,500 in overhead to maintain relationships with

each vendor. As such, if the margin from selling a vendors products dips below that
threshold the vendor is considered to be unprofitable. Two vendors, “Zemlak Ltd” and
“Brekke PLC” are going to be raising their prices. Every product they currently provide to
the company will increase by a flat $.50 in cost. Management is insistent that they do
not change the selling price of these items, as customers won’t buy them anymore.
These products also bring in foot traffic. Management does not want to drop the
vendor, thinking that the company overall will still generate a profit for the year selling
those vendor’s products. Reforecast the profit that will be earned on these two vendors’
products for the year assuming the $.50 increase takes place. Are the products helping
the company’s bottom line and providing a positive margin? What recommendation
would you have for management? (10 points)
  Hint: Filter your data on the vendors in question and paste the records into a
new chart. Recalculate the new cost and then profit.

Expectations:

 Your final submission: You are required to submit one properly formatted memo to
Management that addresses each of the topical areas above. Each topical area should be its
own section. The document should be clear, concise, and include graphs, tables, charts as
necessary to convey relevant information. In addition to the writeups requested above,
Management is expecting that you turn in a separate excel document that shows your work.
Your document should be clear and easy for them to follow. For example, if you performed a
Benfords analysis, label that tab of the excel workbook “Benfords”. If you complete an NPV,
label the tab “NPV”. Failure to provide clear documentation will result in loss of points. Failure
to provide an excel document will result in max score of 50%.
 Use the labs completed throughout the semester to help you!!! Most items in this project relate
back to one or two labs.
 The word count is recommended and is meant for guidance only. If you go over it is not the end
of the world. That said, Management has limited time to review your work. Excessively long
answers will have points deducted as you failed to be concise. Extremely short responses will be
considered incomplete. Charts and tables with appropriate labels typically cut down word
counts significantly… use that to your advantage.
 The project submission (word document memo, excel sheet) must be submitted to Blackboard
no later than Wednesday, May 8th by midnight. Failure to meet the deadline will result in a
zero for the project. No exceptions. That means you are better off turning in incomplete work
then nothing at all. At least ATTEMPT items for partial credit.

Overall hints:

 Similar to the descriptive project, the first step is combining all of your data. Go back to week 3-
4 where we covered v-lookups and created relationships between tables in excel. Document all
of the relationships and use v-lookups to pull in data as needed between tables. The sales table
should be your primary table in most of the analysis, so pull data from other tables into it.
 Don’t be afraid to use common sense to do basic calculations. For example, on the sales table
you are told the product sold as well as the quantity. Pull in the selling price and the cost of
these items. Do a simple calculation that multiplies the quantity times the selling price to get the
total sales. A similar calculation with the cost will get you the total cost of goods sold. Similar
calculations can be made for sales taxes, profits, etc.
 I provided you with a data dictionary that tells you what each column on each table represents.
Review it before you get started. Most of the data is obvious, however it might help solve some
basic confusions.
 SAVE YOUR EXCEL WORKBOOK OFTEN!!! Perhaps every 10-15 minutes. Just in case it crashed
you don’t want to lose all of your hard work. If excel is every hung up, just give it a minute or
two. Don’t click around and panic. It might just need a minute to process the task.