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 During
his internship, Josh was given a project to streamline the trade
expense/accrual process for Campbell USA. The trade expense is
for trade promotions performed by grocers (Campbell customers) on
behalf of Campbell. Campbell reimburses the grocers for these
promotions, and Josh observed that the company was classifying 100%
of this liability balance in the current portion of the balance
sheet. Josh knew this was hurting the company in the eyes of
credit agencies who use the breakout between current and non-current
liabilities when assessing a company’s credit rating. After
assembling data on 600,000 separate trade promotions, Josh used
pivot tables to quickly determine that 4% of these promotions
were paid over a year after the actual trade event and thus
qualified as non-current liabilities. Josh used the 4% number
to quantify the dollar amount of liabilities that could be
reclassified as non-current as part of his argument to change how
these liabilities would be classified in the future.
Josh’s work and insights received the following
praise from Carolyn Smart, Brand Finance Manager:
"I was very impressed with Josh's approach to this
project and his use of tools to analyze the data and quantify the
impact of his findings. Josh's recommendations not only improved the
efficiency and consistency of our trade accrual process, but they
also improved the accuracy of our balance sheet account
classifications. We have already implemented several of his
recommendations and truly value the insights that he brought to one
of our largest expenses.”
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