QUESTION 1

1. a)Briefly describe two ways a company could lower its operating cycle

b)Briefly describe one way a company could lower its cash cycle (that are different from theways listed in part a

2.A company that offers summer camping trips was interested in projecting future sales.They ran a regression using the last five years of quarterly sales data and generated the output shown below. The independent variables were a counter variable (period) that started at one for the first quarter of the time-series data and incremented by one for each subsequent quarter and dummy variables for quarters 1-3 (Q1, Q2, Q3). Sales figures are in $thousands.

Coefficient

Intercept 1000.00 Period45.00 Q1-85.00 Q2125.00Q3 220.00

What is the predicted sales for a quarter that is in period 28 and corresponds to the fourth quarter of the company's fiscal year?

3.Suppose you wanted to create an if statement to check the weight (percent of money)you have invested in particular stocks.The if statement should generate textual output that follows these parameters:

If the weight is greater than 0.05 and less than 0.10,the text output should be "OK"

If the weight is less than 0.05, the text output should be "Underweighted"

If the weight is more than 0.10, the text output should be "Overweighted"

Assume the weight is located in cell B2.

Write the if statement you would use in Excel to generate the desired text.

4.A firm has an operating cycle of 25 days,a cash cycle of 10 days, and an inventory period of 12 days.Which of the following statements are true?

It takes the firm an average of 12 days between when it receives an invoice from purchasing raw material to when it sells finished goods.

It takes the firm an average of 10 days between when it receives an invoice from purchasing raw material to when it has to pay cash for the material.

It takes the firm an average of 25 days between when it receives an invoice from purchasing raw material to when it sells finished goods.

It takes the firm an average of 10 days between when it sells a finished good to when it receives cash from the sale.