Noble is a restaurant that is only open in the evenings, on SIX days of the week. It has e

ight restaurant and kitchen staff, each paid a wage of $8 per hour on the basis of hours actually worked. It also has a restaurant manager and a head chef, each of whom is paid a monthly salary of $4,300. Noble’s budget and actual figures for the month of May was as follows:

The budget above is based on the following assumptions:

1 The restaurant is only open six days a week and there are four weeks in a month. The average number of orders each day is 50 and demand is evenly spread across all the days in the month.

2 The restaurant offers two meals: Meal A, which costs $35 per meal and Meal B, which costs $45 per meal. In addition to this, irrespective of which meal the customer orders, the average customer consumes four drinks each at $2·50 per drink. Therefore, the average spend per customer is either $45 or $55 including drinks, depending on the type of meal selected. The May budget is based on 50% of customers ordering Meal A and 50% of customers ordering Meal B.

3 Food costs represent 12·5% of revenue from food sales.

4 Drink costs represent 20% of revenue from drinks sales.

5 When the number of orders per day does not exceed 50, each member of hourly paid staff is required to work exactly six hours per day. For every incremental increase of five in the average number of orders per day, each member of staff has to work 0·5 hours of overtime for which they are paid at the increased rate of $12 per hour. You should assume that all costs for hourly paid staff are treated wholly as variable costs.

6 Energy costs are deemed to be related to the total number of hours worked by each of the hourly paid staff, and are absorbed at the rate of $2·94 per hour worked by each of the eight staff.

Required:

(a) Prepare a flexed budget for the month of May, assuming that the standard mix of customers remains the same as budgeted. (12 marks)

(b) After preparation of the flexed budget, you are informed that the following variances have arisen in relation to total food and drink sales:

(c) Noble’s owner told the restaurant manager to run a half-price drinks promotion at Noble for the month of May on all drinks. Actual results showed that customers ordered an average of six drinks each instead of the usual four but, because of the promotion, they only paid half of the usual cost for each drink. You have calculated the sales margin price variance for drink sales alone and found it to be a worrying $11,700 adverse. The restaurant manager is worried and concerned that this makes his performance for drink sales look very bad.

Required:

Briefly discuss TWO other variances that could be calculated for drinks sales or food sales in order to ensure that the assessment of the restaurant manager’s performance is fair. These should be variances that COULD be calculated from the information provided above although no further calculations are required here. (4 marks)