Case Model Working Capital
- 05:19
Forecasting working capital in a retail company model.
Transcript
We're going to build our working capital forecast for Burberry and for completeness we will also build the remaining operating asset and liability forecasts. We'll be doing this in the balance sheet tab as shown here. Now you can see as I've highlighted here, we've been given some assumptions for these items. So let's take a quick look at those before we start building our forecasts. Receivable days are being used to forecast receivables. These reduce significantly during the forecast period so let's think why this might be, well you might remember that our retail revenue growth is 4% per year whilst you might remember that wholesale revenue growth is very low and licensing revenue growth is negative in the first forecast year. Retail business has very little in the way of receivables so we can expect that as retail business grows receivables relative to revenue will fall. Inventory days are being used to forecast inventory note that we haven't forecasted cost of sales. So the historic and forecast assumptions use total operating costs instead. Inventory days stay constant during the forecast period and are slightly higher than the previous year. This will be very dependent on product mix inventory days for beauty and fragrance will be higher than for clothing. So the analyst is presumably forecasting a greater proportion of beauty and fragrance in the product next. Payable days are being used to forecast payables, again this uses operating costs rather than cost of sales. These are being held constant and in line with prior payables days, which presumably reflects no major changes in the supply chain. The assumptions for the remaining operating assets and liabilities, that's other current assets, other non-current assets, other current liabilities, and other non current liabilities are all being held constant with the prior year numbers. This is pretty standard unless you have specific drivers for these as any major changes to these numbers will create significant cash inflows or cash outflows in your forecasts. Let's now build our working capital numbers in the usual way.
And those who are working capital forecasts for Burberry.