ACCT 2301 Spring 2025

Currently, DLI gains customers through direct sales. They estimate it takes approximately 16 hours of sales effort and the associated time to “on board” a customer. DLI is targeting a narrow niche of customers characterized as having pre-packaged physical products that require no additional preparation. They plan to attract customers who want to know exactly when andwhat they are going to pay. DLI plans to grow with these customers handling their  fulfillment as the customer expands. As DLI grows, it will then plan to take on medium sized companies who want to upgrade their supply chain process.

DLI has three main competitors, Boatline which has their services online, but requires customers to know both the location of their warehouse and how best to ship their products to the warehouse. Choosing a warehouse can be one of the most costly factors in logistics. S-Commerce includes the entire logistics process, but focuses mainly on e-commerce. Their third customer, Jungle, prefers only large customers. It is November and DLI is seeking a $10,000 grant from IDEA’s Funding Board to help grow their company. DLI plans to use part of the funds to hire a designer to improve the user experience. The improved user experience on the website will facilitate the process of gaining customers. Currently, “on-boarding” customers takes a longer time because it is necessary to walk customers through their dashboard. With less time spent on this process, DLI can focus its time on gaining more customers. They also plan to use some of the funds to hire a programmer to develop a sales tool to help DLI reach thousands of businesses that go through company incubators and venture capital firms.

DLI also plans to use some of its sales efforts to start strategic partnerships with company incubators to become preferred vendors and be able to reach more startups. Ideally, DLI plans to be relevant to physical product companies at every stage of the supply chain. After DLI has built up their user interface and has on-boarded 10 paying customers, they plan to target popular newspapers, magazines and social media platforms to write content about the innovative nature of DLI’s business model.

As part of the funding process, DLI has developed projected sales and expense forecasts, with and without funding. These are displayed in Tables 1 and 2. As part of the stage gate process, DLI has a meeting with the IDEA Board relative to their funding request, strategy and projected business plan. In preparation for the meeting, the DLI team – largely current or recently graduated software engineer majors at Northeastern University –has asked for your help. As a student in DMSB and someone who has successfully completed the managerial accounting course, they know that you can help them prepare for their meeting. You think that this is a great opportunity for you to put your managerial accounting skills to work in an advisory role for these entrepreneurs. Knowing the power of managerial accounting data, you anticipate the following questions to be asked. You should prepare cogent answers to these questions, draw relevant insights and provide any supporting exhibits and/or visualizations that you believe will illuminate your analysis. You should use Excel for your analyses. In your advisory role, you need to prepare DLI to pitch their idea for funding. 

REQUIRED QUESTIONS

Assume grant funding for these questions