Ms. Roddick Wants to Know
Now that you have completed a simplified forecast, prepare a forecast based on the
full range of accounts as actually reported by The Body Shop in 2001. Exhibit 8 presents the results for the past three years. Please forecast all of the accounts individually for the next three years. You will see many familiar accounts, as well as some unusual accounts like minority interests.
For most accounts, you should extrapolate by using the same percentage of sales
borne out by the preceding years’ experience. You might use an average of the three
historical years. You might want to use only the most recent year, or if you notice a
significant upward or downward trend in an account, try growing or shrinking the percentage in the future years, according to your judgment. Whatever assumptions you
decide upon, you should again isolate them at the top of your worksheet, so you can
easily change an assumption and then have it flow through your worksheet. Additionally, this is very important for calculating sensitivities later, as you want to be able
to point to one cell as the “Column Input Cell“ in a data table.
Please make “overdrafts” the plug figure, and base interest expense (at 6%] on
the overdrafts,. current portion of long-term debt, and long-term liabilities. If you
skipped to this section without doing the exercise above, you may differ from your
fellow students in your treatment of the ease where debt is negative.