Investigating Richer Sounds PLC.

 

The type of work undertaken by the finance department                         

The Finance department of Richer Sounds keeps track of all the money being earned and spent by Richer Sounds. The main activities of the Finance department are:

• Obtaining capital and resources
• Preparing accounts.
• Paying wages and salaries to staff.

 A few other responsibilities of the Finance department include:

• Making credit checks on customers before goods are supplied on credit.
• Checking and recording payments received for goods sold and chasing up outstanding debts.
• The checking of all financial documents relating to the purchase of goods, such as invoices received, and matching these against stock delivered.
• Monitoring the value of items held in stock and the value of orders outstanding to ensure that payments due will not adversely affect the cash flow of the business.
• Checking bank statements and other banking records.
• Answering individual queries from colleagues about their pay or pay slip and recording changed information, such as change of address or maternity leave.
• Costing new projects and obtaining additional capital for these are required.

      The type of work undertaken by Marketing                                 

The marketing department are responsible for making sure that the customers know about the business, at Richer Sounds the marketing department is responsible for the company website because they have carried out the research into the sales of goods at Richer Sounds. The other types of activities carried out by the marketing department include:

• A key activity of marketing is to analyse feedback from customers and information about competitors to identify their future marketing strategy. This helps them to decide how to advertise and promote their products and their business.

• Colleagues in the ‘design’ section of marketing produce Richer Sounds in-store A3 newsletters, which they issue every fortnight as well as their advertisements, which they place in the national press and in specialist magazines. All Richer Sounds original point-of-sale materials (such as their signs, price tickets and leaflets) are created by the designers.

The Marketing department have small departments, for example ‘Market research’. ‘Market research’ is involved in: surveys on customer needs and research into new or existing products. There is also the promotional department, which is involved, in advertising, sales promotion and publicity campaigns.

How the functional areas work together to support the business activity and achieve the aims and objectives of Richer Sounds

For the three functional areas to support the business activity and to achieve the aims and objectives of the business successfully, they need to have good communication between them. This can be achieved by oral communications and written communications. E.g. using the phone, sending emails, face-to-face conversations or team meetings.

Here is an example of how the three functional areas work together to support the business activity of Richer Sounds:

 

 

Here is an example of how the three functional areas work together to achieve the aims and objectives of Richer Sounds, the objective is:

Open between four and six stores in the current year.

        

                                 

Richer Sounds have a suggestion scheme. Every member of staff has a suggestion pad and their Chairman, Julian Richer, reads every single suggestion. The idea is that everyone / every functional can contribute towards ideas for future improvement. This is a way of functional areas combining and working together to achieve the aims and objectives of Richer Sounds, for example one of their aims is to ‘Keep the level of excellence of customer service’. This can be achieved by:

• The Customer Services department keeping records and taking surveys from customers of how good Richer Sounds customer service level is.
• All the functional areas giving ideas on how to develop their level of customer service, for example the finance department checking if they have sufficient capital to spend on improving the Customer Services department of Richer Sounds and the human resources department giving feedback on how they can give training to employees of the Customer Service department to improve it.  

The differences between contributions made by the different functional areas 

Each functional area has its own responsibility and contribution to make within Richer Sounds, for Richer sounds to be a successful company each functional area needs to be well organised, work well together and stick to their responsibilities. Without all of this the company would fall apart. E.g. the three functional areas, which I have chosen, have different responsibilities and different contributions to make, which are:

• Store Operations- This functional area is responsible for the stores operations. This involves checking the store achieves its targets, checking stock orders and managing colleague problems.  

• Finance- This functional area is responsible for all the money being earned and spent by richer sounds. They are responsible for the preparation of financial documents of the sales of goods, they pay the suppliers of the stock, which, Richer sounds, buy and they prepare monthly management accounts.

• Marketing- This functional area is responsible for making sure the public know about Richer sounds, e.g. advertising. They do this by keeping the Richer Sounds website up-to-date and keeping the store looking lively and interesting e.g. posters, fixtures and lighting this is known as ‘Point-of-sale’.    

Store operations would only be responsible for the business aims and objectives of the store, but they would not go into being responsible for the stores budget because this is the responsibility of the finance department and the Finance department would not go into advertising because this is the contribution made by the Marketing department. These are the contributions each functional area would make to keep the business moving forward.

 

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