Financial inclusion and analysis of Shopfront Ltd.

Abstract

Doing Internship and writing a report is an integral and important part of the BBA Program. To complete the degree, I need to write this report by keeping in mind that both my academic knowledge that I achieved from the program’s courses and practical experience, I gained while working at ShopFront Ltd. where I worked as an intern for almost 3.5 months. I joined ShopFront Ltd (ShopUp) in October and since than I have been working with the Finance and Accounts team of one of the ShopUp site business Unicorn (a food distribution business, connecting with big distribution houses to resell their product at a reasonable price to the customer through apps or shopping stores). Working there has been an amazing journey for me since I got to learn a lot about the finance and accounts related work and also about the B2B platform how it works. Not only that, but it has also given me to understand about the micro entrepreneurs how they resell their products through online. ShopUp is the only B2B platform F commerce in Bangladesh till now. It has been doing great with it’s site businesses like REDX which is a logistics business responsible for delivering products all around Bangladesh, BlueX is giving opportunity to micro entrepreneurs to come up and resell their products through shopUp apps so that they can earn something and start doing something of their own. Moreover, there is Unicorn who acts as a distribution channel by grabbing big distributors to sell their products to customers or other retailers or whole salers through the same app and lastly their ShopUp eloan credit who gives eloans to micro entrepreneurs to start their business to resell their products that is under BlueX. Furthermore, the management policy of hiring process and conducting an interview is being done under their career page or other social medias like linkedin, facebook, bdjobs etc. They do their branding through Instagram, Facebook or Youtube to make aware of their services especially REDX about delivering products. Moreover, the finance and accounts department play a vital role in the company, the balance sheet and income statement they create is basically the business profit what comes from the business, the assets they are financing, the debts they have been clearing and other investors who have been investing so that they can finance on their assets and cover up the debts. The ratios, trend analysis and common size analysis gives an idea about the company financial status of how they are doing in the market, till now they do not have competitors, so they are playing safe at the market. And lastly their operations team who are involved with day-to-day operations in the company and IT department gives or provides support through technology to run the operations smoothly. The objective of the report is to forecast the company financial income statement and balance sheet to see what their status in their upcoming journey will be. For which a proforma income statement and balance sheet is being created by which sales forecasting is being created to look up the annual growth rate of the company from 2018-2022 (2020-2022, forecasted years), then AFN method (a simple financial approach to find out how much amount of fund is required to make the business runs smoothly), then forecasting financial ratios to see whether their assets, liabilities or equity is improving or not. Since I joined, I have seen the company improved a lot from 2019 as most of the time they financed their assets with debt but after getting a huge investment they started financing those on their assets, covering up the debts, and getting more return on assets and equities which shows they have been generating their income precisely and by forecasting they will do more. I have done forecasting and AFN and sales forecasting approaches to see the financial economic condition whether they will do better or not and bring changes in the statements.