Discuss about the Managerial Accounting for National Australia Bank.
The current report intends to provide brief evaluation of the activity-based costing (ABC) model along with its characteristics from the business perspective. For meeting the purpose of this report, the model is associated with an ASX listed organisation for improving the management accounting information present to its top management team. In this report, National Australia Bank (NAB) is selected, which is one of the biggest financial institutions in Australia in terms of earnings, market capitalisation and customers. Based on the existing goals and corporate strategies of NAB, the alignment is made with the ABC model for enabling the top management of the bank so that suitable decisions could be undertaken. In addition, the report lays emphasis on providing recommendations regarding the ways the ABC model could be implemented in NAB. Finally, the report sheds light on suggesting another management accounting tool for NAB that would aid in the decision-making process of the top management.
ABC model is a method of accounting that identifies the activities performed on the part of an organisation and after this; the indirect costs are allocated to products. In other words, this model realises the association among activities, costs and products and with the help of such relationship, the indirect costs are assigned to products less arbitrarily compared to the conventional models of accounting (Al-Nuaimi, Mohamed and Alekam 2017). ABC model has certain features, which are enumerated briefly as follows:
For aligning with the goals and strategies of NAB, it is necessary to identify them initially and then the role of the ABC model has been discussed to aid in achieving the strategies of the bank.
The mission of NAB is to deliver suitable solutions to its customers by bearing in mind their needs. The bank believes that profitability is extremely crucial in order to ensure its long-term success in the Australian financial services sector. In addition, it emphasises on developing a working environment that would help in strengthening the morale and confidence of its employees (Nab.com.au 2018). NAB intends to become the most reputed bank in Australia by aiding in the smooth flow of capital and money in the market for meeting the customer requirements.
The main corporate strategies that NAB uses for marketing its products and services constitute of the following:
Although ABC model is more popular in the global manufacturing sector, its significance to the services sector could not be ignored because of the varying features of the two types of industries. As advocated by Butler and Ghosh (2015), there are no direct costs for the financial institutions, as majority of the costs are treated as overheads. In addition, these institutions do not hold service stocks, as the services are consumed at the time they are produced.
ABC model contains three sections, which include activity, resource and cost object (Cooper 2017). In case of NAB, the resource section includes expenses associated with different departments like cost centres or functions. The grouping of these departments is made at corporate office, branches, channels such as call centres, direct selling agents, ATM, internet and shared service departments such as human resource and information technology. The services of the shared service departments are described and accordingly, the costs are computed (Dale and Plunkett 2017). Depending on the service volume of the departments, the costs are transferred to the other departments.
In NAB, the activities are described in accordance with the transactions that the customers perform for different products utilising various channels like commercial loan origination. In this case, the activities might be obtaining the application, interviewing the applicant, overview of credit history along with evaluation of the applicant, undertaking decision and loan amount disbursement. After defining all the transactions, they would be segregated into activities in the ABC model (Edmonds et al. 2016). As a result, NAB could be able to reduce the burden of ATM costs on customers while the interest on loans could be lowered as well. Moreover, the cost of adopting new technologies to provide effective support to the customers could be minimised as well.
In relation to cost object section, it needs to be segregated into two parts. The initial section computes the different transaction costs that the customers have performed for different products by using different distribution channels (Keller 2015). This might be in the form of withdrawing cash via ATM for savings account. In this case, it could be observed that cash withdrawal for current account and savings account might not differ for NAB; however, it is necessary to compute the costs separately. Moreover, such identification of accounts would help NAB to identify the customers making frequent cash withdrawals and accordingly, credit cards would be provided to them at minimised rate of interest.
In order to implement the ABC model for NAB, it is necessary for the top management to provide adequate support. Secondly, the implementation and design of the ABC model needs to be the accountability of cross-functional team, instead of the accounting department. The bank needs to form a team, which would comprise of representatives from each department for using the data generated from the ABC model (Law 2014). This would comprise of representatives from different departments of NAB like marketing, engineering, top management and accounting staffs having technical skills. It needs to appoint an external consultant specialised in ABC model to seek advice for the team.
The top-level management of NAB needs to support the implementation of ABC model because of two reasons. Firstly, in the absence of leadership from higher-level management, the managers of the bank would be resistant towards change (Reider 2016). Secondly, if the top management of NAB does not support the system, the subordinates might feel that there is less significance of the ABC model and they might abandon the initiative. In addition, the cross-functional teams need to be involved in the implementation of ABC model for suitable allocation of costs to each department. As a result, it would help the bank to use the model for external financial reports (Subramaniam and Watson 2016).
Budgetary control is identified as another effective tool of management accounting for NAB, since budgets play a significant part in planning and controlling and the managers use them for planning, monitoring and controlling different activities at each organisational level. There are certain benefits that NAB could derive by implementing budgetary control, which are elucidated as follows:
Conclusion:
Based on the above evaluation, it could be cited that the ABC model helps in segregating costs into variable costs and fixed costs in order to provide quality information to design an effective cost system in a corporate entity. NAB is focused to maintain competitive advantage in the Australian banking industry by providing quality services to the customers while minimising the overall costs for both the customers and the bank. In this context, ABC model is of utmost importance, as this model helps in identifying those departments or activities generating lower income for the bank. As a result, NAB could assign higher costs to those activities based on the customer needs for minimising their overall cost along with increasing the awareness of the customers. Finally, another management accounting tool that is suitable for NAB is identified as NAB, since the managers of the bank could identify the variances from the actual budget. Accordingly, corrective actions could be taken to minimise those variances and errors in external reports.
References:
Al-Bawab, A.A. and Al-Rawashdeh, H., 2016. The Impact of the Activity Based Costing System (ABC) in the Pricing of Services Banks in the Jordanian commercial Banks: A Field Study. International Business Research, 9(4), p.1.
Al-Nuaimi, S.I.M., Mohamed, R. and Alekam, J.M.E., 2017. The Link between Information Technology, Activity-based Costing Implementation and Organizational Performance. International Review of Management and Marketing, 7(1).
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Banker, R.D. and Byzalov, D., 2014. Asymmetric cost behavior. Journal of Management Accounting Research, 26(2), pp.43-79.
Butler, S.A. and Ghosh, D., 2015. Individual differences in managerial accounting judgments and decision making. The British Accounting Review, 47(1), pp.33-45.
Cooper, R., 2017. Target costing and value engineering. Routledge.
Dale, B.G. and Plunkett, J.J., 2017. Quality costing. Routledge.
Edmonds, T.P., Edmonds, C.D., Tsay, B.Y. and Olds, P.R., 2016. Fundamental managerial accounting concepts. McGraw-Hill Education.
Eldenburg, L.G., Wolcott, S.K., Chen, L.H. and Cook, G., 2016. Cost management: Measuring, monitoring, and motivating performance. Wiley Global Education.
Keller, W.D., 2015. Cost and Managerial Accounting II Essentials (Vol. 2). Research & Education Assoc.
Law, J. ed., 2014. A dictionary of finance and banking. Oxford University Press.
Nab.com.au., 2018. Personal. [online] Available at: https://www.nab.com.au/ [Accessed 9 May 2018].
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