Polar is a food retailer specializing in chilled and frozen ready meals, soups and snacks. It supplies supermarket and small grocery chains across the island of Ireland. The company has been growing rapidly in recent years as a result of the success of its new ranges: ‘Takeaway to Home’, ‘Veggie Go’ and ‘Protein Pick Up’. Developing and marketing these new ranges has been the primary focus of Polar’s management in recent years, and funds for investment in accounting systems and additional staff has not been available. Polar’s management thought that the accounts department had been coping reasonably well with the additional sales – after all, there was plenty of money coming in. However, a number of issues have come to light since the long-serving accounts receivable clerk, Jill, had a traffic accident a few months ago and has been unable to return to work. A temporary staff member, Jane, was appointed and identified that customers had been receiving statements only on an ad hoc basis, and increasingly rarely. When Jane began sending monthly statements there was a flurry of complaints and queries from customers, who did not recognize some invoices and credit notes on their statements. Some payments also appeared to be missing. Jane is concerned that there are major weaknesses in the controls around receiving cash which may have been exploited by Jill. Additionally, other problems were flagged by customers in the ordering process. Customers complained that deliveries were often incorrect – including unordered items, incorrect items/quantities, and missing items. The existing process of having to call in or email their orders was felt to be unnecessarily time-consuming.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

To put it bluntly much of the 57 trillion global grocery industry is in trouble Although it has grown at about 45 percent annually over the past decade that growth has been highly unevenand has masked ... View the full answer