Creating a Balanced Scorecard [LO4]

Ariel Tax Services prepares tax returns for individual and corporate clients. As the company has gradually expanded to 10 offices, the founder, Max Jacobs, has begun to feel as though he is losing control of operations. In response to this concern, he has decided to implement a performance measurement system that will help control current operations and facilitate his plans of expanding to 20 offices.

Jacobs describes the keys to the success of his business as follows:

“Our only real asset is our people. We must keep our employees highly motivated and we must hire the ‘cream of the crop.’ Interestingly, employee morale and recruiting success are both driven by the same two factors—compensation and career advancement. In other words, providing superior compensation relative to the industry average coupled with fast-track career advancement opportunities keeps morale high and makes us a very attractive place to work. It drives a high rate of job offer acceptances relative to job offers tendered.”

“Hiring highly qualifi ed people and keeping them energized ensures operational success, which in our business is a function of productivity, effi ciency, and effectiveness. Productivity boils down to employees being billable rather than idle. Effi ciency relates to the time required to complete a tax return. Finally, effectiveness is critical to our business in the sense that we cannot tolerate errors. Completing a tax return quickly is meaningless if the return contains errors.”

“Our growth depends on acquiring new customers through word-of-mouth from satisfi ed repeat customers. We believe that our customers come back year after year because they value error-free, timely, and courteous tax return preparation. Common courtesy is an important aspect of our business! We call it service quality, and it all ties back to employee morale in the sense that happy employees treat their clients with care and concern.”

“While sales growth is obviously important to our future plans, growth without a corresponding increase in profi tability is useless. Therefore, we understand that increasing our profi t margin is a function of cost-effi ciency as well as sales growth. Given that payroll is our biggest expense, we must maintain an optimal balance between staffi ng levels and the revenue being generated. As I alluded to earlier, the key to maintaining this balance is employee productivity.

If we can achieve cost-effi cient sales growth, we should eventually have 20 profi table offi ces!”

Required:

1. Create a balanced scorecard for Ariel Tax Services. Link your scorecard measures using the framework from Exhibit 11–5 . Indicate whether each measure is expected to increase or decrease. Feel free to create measures that may not be specifically mentioned in the chapter, but make sense given the strategic goals of the company.

2. What hypotheses are built into the balanced scorecard for Ariel Tax Services? Which of these hypotheses do you believe are most questionable and why?

3. Discuss the potential advantages and disadvantages of implementing an internal business process measure called total dollar amount of tax refunds generated. Would you recommend using this measure in Ariel’s balanced scorecard?

4. Would it be beneficial to attempt to measure each office’s individual performance with respect to the scorecard measures that you created? Why or why not?