Hello! Could you please evaluate my essay? Thank you in advance!
Prompt:
The following appeared in a memorandum from a member of a financial management and consulting firm:
“We have learned from an employee of Windfall, Ltd., that its accounting department, by checking about 10 percent of the last month’s purchasing invoices for errors and inconsistencies, saved the company some $10,000 in overpayments. In order to help our clients increase their net gains, we should advise each of them to institute a policy of checking all purchasing invoices for errors. Such a recommendation could also help us get the Windfall account by demonstrating to Windfall the rigorousness of our methods.”
Response:
The member of the financial management and consulting firm claims that by advising clients to check all purchasing invoices for errors, the firm would help clients increase their net gains while increasing its chances of attracting Windfall as a client. This conclusion is based on the premise that, according to an employee of Windfall, Ltd., Windfall's accounting department saved $10,000 in overpayments by checking one tenth of the previous month's purchasing invoices for errors and incosistencies. This argument, as it stands, is flawed because it evaluates a strategy on the basis of one single occurence, and because it assumes that a similar, but more rigorous strategy will have an even better result.
First of all, the author of the argument assumes that the strategy of checking invoices will be beneficial because that was the case, according to a single individual, with Windfall last month. For one thing, the individual might have lied to the financial management and consulting firm or might have misinterpreted the results of the checking mechanism. Even if what the individual reported was true, the strategy of checking invoices might not have consistent results over time. For instance, the month that Windfall saved $10,000 in orverpayments might have been a hectic month for its suppliers leading to many more mistakes compared with other months. A multiple revision of the strategy with similar results would provide sounder grounds to evaluate its outcome.
Secondly, the author recommends a strategy that is not the same as the one followed by Windfall. What he proposes is checking all the invoices instead of checking a fraction of them. Even if Windfall's strategy is indeed succesful, as implied by the author, the strategy of checking all of the invoices might not be as succesful and, most importantly, as efficient. To illustrate, it might not be feasible for a client to check all of the purchasing invoices, or the cost of doing so might be unbearable.
Finally, as cost was mentioned in the end of the previous paragraph, there is no information provided about how much checking invoices for errors and incosistencies cost Windfall. It might as well be the case that the resources allocated to check just a fraction of the invoices cost more than $10,000, leading to a net loss for Windfall. If the mechanism used for checking invoices do not become more efficient when used in scale or, in other words, when used to check all invoices, the loss might be even greater. Hence, the clients might experience a loss instead of a gain from the strategy proposed.
In summary, the member of the consulting firm recommends a strategy, the results of which are not necessarily beneficial. If the strategy fails, the clients of the firm would be in loss and the consulting firm would fail in attracting Windfall. Before recommending the introduction of an invoice checking policy, the firm should test it a sufficient amount of times to draw safer conclusions regarding its feasibility and benefits for prospective clients.