It’s a group project about a chosen company and my groups chosen company is Bayerische Motoren Werke AG (BMW)
my role as a group member is to perform
Member 2: Data Collection & Analysis
Task: Handle the data collection and analysis portion.
Subtasks:
Gather financial reports of the chosen company and its competitors.
Perform cross-sectional and time-series analysis.
Focus on one aspect such as sales, cost, or fixed assets and provide a line-item breakdown.
Please read through and follow carefully these instructions as well as all the other documents that i have atahced because following is vital for me to do it correctly
Accounting 978 Spring 2024
The term project is a group project. Students should form groups of from three (3) to five (5) people and submit reports on Luiss Learn. Reports will be graded based on both their analysis (contents) and writing (presentation) from 0 to 10 points (no decimal) and count toward 20% of the course grade. All members of a group will receive the same grade for the project.
Each additional member beyond the cap (5) will result in two (2) points of penalty.
Eachmemberbelowtheminimumrequirement(3)willresultintwo(2)pointsofpenalty,
e.g., if you do the project solo, you will get at most 10 – (3 – 1) × 2 = 6 points. The group project aims to expose you to:
• teamwork,
• data collection,
• data analysis, and
• academic/business writing
Excellent report should show accomplishments in these aspects.
1 Requirements
Write a report about a listed company of your choice. The company of your choice should be a merchandiser or a manufacturer. There is no additional limitation such as where the company is listed, etc.
Your report should enhance the reader’s understanding of the company and help the reader to decide whether it is financially rewarding to invest in the company.
In so doing, your report must include cross-sectional (against competitors) and time series (against the company’s past) analysis. The number of competitors should be at least as many as the number of group members.1 Time series should be at least five (5) years and ending in 2023 the earliest.
Contents The analysis must be based on the company and its related companies’ financial reports. You do not need to cover all aspects of the company. Focus on just one aspect (sales, cost, fixed assets, etc.).
Your analysis must break down at least one line-item on either the income statement or the balance sheet (according to the aspect you are focusing on).
Line-itembreakdownisoftennotreadilyavailableonGoogle/Yahoo!Finance,etc.,which means you must consult the notes to the original financial reports.
You are allowed to use Google/Yahoo! Finance for other general-purpose analysis.
Not always possible, but performing a value-chain analysis (on suppliers and customers)
is a major plus.
1
Hint: Competitors can be identified from proxy statements.
1
Choice of subject Despite that there is almost no limitation on choice of subject (company you would cover), I strongly discourage crowding around a few star companies. I will rank reports covering the same subject, and no two reports on any subject will receive the same grade. Different aspects of the same company are considered as different subject.
• Suppose, in an extreme case, 11 groups decide to cover Apple’s sales, then the worst report will receive 0 point regardless of absolute report quality.
I encourage you to choose Italian and European subjects and test whether what you’ve learned in the course is applicable internationally. Smaller and more focused companies are often easier to analyze.
Submission You should submit either a Word or PDF file on Luiss Learn. Deadline is at 11:59PM on May 8, 2024, regardless of which final exam you are registered to. I will not grade before the deadline, so you may submit revisions. Regarding the document—
2
The electronic document should be formatted on A4-sized pages, with page margin of 2–3 centimeters on each side, font size between 11 and 12, and text double-spaced.
The text should not exceed 10 pages. There is no minimum page limit. Tables, figures, and list of reference do not add toward the page count.
The file should not exceed 10 megabytes.
Recommended practice
The title Although not always easy, entitling your report with a catching phrase can help you communicate your findings and make a good impression before your reader gets to the text. That said, a plain title such as “Group project on Company X” is still better than no title.
Put your names immediately under the title. Do not withhold your names until the end or even forget to put them into the document. Do not include your professor’s name.
When submitting your report electronically, include your (last) names as part of the file name.
Text formatting Choose a conventional typeface with serif. If you cannot decide, use Times New Roman.
Once format choices are made (typeface, font size, page margin, and line spacing), use then throughout the entire documents.
Use bold fonts or italic shapes sparsely if at all.
It’s okay to center titles, section titles, and captions. But do not center blocks of text (para- graphs, even entire sections).
Tables and figures Use tables and figures when they communicate better than text. All tables and figures should have captions and short explanatory notes and be numbered consecutively. Tables and figures should occupy the full width of the page. Do not use a table and a figure to show the same set of information. Instead of inserting tables and figures into the text, consider putting all tables and figures at the end of your report.
In tables:
Format numbers in a suitable and consistent way within the table and align them to the
right side of each cell.
A single number should not run over one row no matter what.
Do not use vertical rules at all and use horizontal rules sparsely.
Do not copy-paste tables as images.
In figures:
• Always specify what are on the x- and y-axes in the notes.
2
• Do not include random imagery in your report.
Screenshots The most common and offensive mistake is to bloat your report with screenshots. Do not use screenshots unless the screenshots per se are what you intend to show. (You don’t need to screenshot the financial reports to prove that you’ve consulted them.) Instead, extract and process the information from the source and re-tabulate the data properly; this is
part of the exercise.
Report structure Breaking your report into sections to highlight its structure helps you orga- nize your report in a logical way. You may find the following layout useful:
Introduction Provide basic information about the subject you chose (1 paragraph). This can
be extended if the subject is not a household name. Also explain why you are interested in the subject in the mode to convince your reader to share your view. Briefly summarize what you’ve done and what you’ve found.
Main body Describe your method and your finding in detail. Focus on what you do, (when necessary) justify your research choice, and most importantly, what you’ve found. You often need more than one sections here.
Conclusion The conclusion should be based on your work. No one can perform the most comprehensive analysis, so it is important you acknowledge the incompleteness of your report.
Reference An itemized list of sources you’ve consulted.
Reference Each item in the reference should contain at least the name of the author(s), the year in which the source is published, and the title of the source.
Sources can be journal articles, working papers, books, book chapters, news articles, maga- zine articles, web pages, etc.
You shall not list financial reports as your source. It suffices as long as you mention in the text that you used the financial reports. The same applies to websites, such as Google finance, SEC EDGAR, etc.
For online resource, you should provide the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Check if URLs can be shortened and make sure they work after shortening.
Review your report Run your document through a grammar checker and review issues it raises. You don’t have to accept every change it suggests, but you need to have a reason not to accept a proposed change.
Manually proofread (read out) your report before submission.
3
