CASE STUDY USING EXCEL SPREADSHEET

You work for Theo Walcott Tours Ltd which provide tourists and visitors with ‘experiences’ of Perth and its surrounds. Your manager is currently investigating introducing another product, which are ‘Luxury’ helicopter rides over beautiful bushland. Each trip would be 50km in total.

Your manager wants you to use cost-volume-profit analysis in order to help assess the plan’s feasibility.

She provides you with the following estimated data:

Selling price per trip: $600 (total for 3 customers – trips only run with 3 customers)

Costs:

Fuel: $50 per trip

Walcott ‘goodie bag’ per customer: $40

Helicopter rental per month: $20,000

Insurance per month (unlimited trips): $1,000

Pilot costs: $5,000 per month plus $100 per trip

Maintenance costs are difficult to estimate but data from a similar company in a different location shows that these monthly costs were $11,000 when 5,000 kms were flown and $5000 when 1,500 kms were flown.

REQUIRED: Calculate the following:

1) The Break-even point in trips per month

2) The Break-even point in dollars of revenue per month

3) Assuming a profit after tax requirement from the Helicopter trip business of $120,000 per year and a tax rate of 30%, calculate:

a) Trips required per month to obtain target profit

b) Revenue required per month to obtain target profit

Your manager has requested that the spreadsheet is easy to use for ‘What-if’ analysis – so she would like to be able to change some of the inputs to see the impact on the calculations above – for example, if the Helicopter were able to be rented more cheaply or the selling price was increased.

4) Answering briefly in words in excel, include some notes to your manager explaining the limitations of your analysis and the assumptions included in it.