Business Report: Roles and Responsibilities in Aldi UK Operations

This report provides an introduction to business operations, emphasizing the significance of well-defined organizational roles and responsibilities. It examines the roles and importance of various departments, including marketing, finance, and human resources, and discusses the crucial role of teamwork in enhancing efficiency and collaboration. The report delves into financial management, highlighting its importance in strategic planning and resource allocation, as well as financial reporting, illustrating its purpose in providing insights into a company's financial health. Using Aldi UK as a case study, the report concludes that the company adheres to responsible organizational practices, effectively achieving its goals and objectives through comprehensive financial reporting and strategic management of its resources.

Running Head: INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
Executive Summary
The organizational roles and responsibilities are foundation of successful business. The
business leader has the role to ensure that entity’s roles and responsibilities are well-defined.
It helps every department and divisions for fitting together as whole. Therefore, this
assignment aims for discussing roles and importance of department, financial management,
teamwork and financial reporting. The report also concludes that Aldi UK follows all
requirements of better and responsible organization that helps in achieving their objectives
and goals. The company also reports their financial statement at each year-end.

2INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Background of Company.......................................................................................................3
Discussion..................................................................................................................................3
Role and Importance of Departments....................................................................................3
Teamwork and its Importance................................................................................................5
Financial Management and Its Importance............................................................................7
Financial Reporting and its Purposes.....................................................................................8
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................9
Reference..................................................................................................................................10

3INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
Introduction
Every company is made up of the different departments. These departments
contributes towards running of business. The common departments of the company includes
production, finance, human resources, marketing & sales and information technology
department. The organizational department performs various duties and functions for
company. Further, employees working in organization are members of team that works
together for achieving goals of organization with the help of using their particular talents and
skills (Shapiro and Hanouna 2019). Hence, this report aims to discuss role and importance of
different functions of organization. Moreover, discussion will be on understanding of the
collaborative working practices. In addition, explanation will be on financial management
and its importance. Lastly, discussion will be on financial reporting and its importance.
Background of Company
Aldi UK is one of the most common name of brand of two German family owned
supermarket discounted chains. The company is having around ten thousand stores in twenty
countries and the combined turnover of company is estimated to be fifty billions. The
foundation of this supermarket chain was in 1946 by Theo Albrecht and Karl, who were
brothers (Aldi.co.uk. 2020).
Discussion
Role and Importance of Departments
Marketing Department
Marketing is considered to be most vital part of the business activity. The marketing
department helps in playing important role in business promotion as well as mission of
organization. This particular department serves as face of organization for representing the

4INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
business and producing and coordinating the materials. In addition, the main job of this
department is for reaching out to investors, customers, community and prospects, while
creating good image that helps in representing company in the positive light (Daft 2015).
Depending upon the entity, marketing department comprises of following set of roles:
 Defining and managing brand of company.
 Conducting the management of campaign for marketing the initiatives.
 Producing marketing and the promotional materials.
 Creation of content to provide search engine optimization for the website.
 Managing and monitoring of the social media.
 Producing the internal communication
 Serving as the liaison of media.
 Conducting the market and customer research.
 Overseeing the outside agencies and vendors.
Finance Department
The department of finance is important department in the business, as under this
department all the matters related to the finance in company are being regulated. These days,
finance department of the firm has broader ranges of the roles for undertaking outside and
inside its business and it carries major responsibilities, particularly in the field of
shareholder’s value that is increasingly gaining its importance. Finance is considered to be
the life blood of entity and it serves as the key ingredient for the successful business. For any
business entity, their performance and success depends on the way of handling finance
(Cummings and Worley 2014). Following are the major roles played by finance department:
 Management of cash flow.
 Regulates different accounts on the daily basis.

5INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
 Designing of long-term and short-term financial strategies.
 Internal Audits.
 Financial advice to company.
Human Resource Department
The professionals of human resource are lifeblood of organization. It is because of the
fact that their job is for ensuring that business gets most out of their employees. The
department of human resource is required to provide higher return on investment of business
in its people. It is backbone of the successful entities. This department has the responsibility
to hire and fire the employees, maintain interoffice relationships, interpreting the laws of
employment and train the workers. It works diligently behind scenes for ensuring that the
entity is running efficiently (Vanblaere and Devos 2018). Following are the main roles and
functions performed by HR department:
 Hiring and Recruiting.
 Training and Development.
 Handling the compensation.
 Employee Benefits.
 Employee Relations
 Legal Responsibilities
Teamwork and its Importance
Teamwork is vital in any business organization, as it helps in providing employees
with the opportunity to bond with each other. This helps them for improving their relations.
The employees that constitute the team working on the project feels valued upon the
successful completion of the tasks. In addition, teamwork enables the employees for
accomplishing the tasks more efficiently and faster than individual tackling projects.

6INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
Coopering together on the different tasks reduces the workloads of every employees
(Laeeque, Babar and Ahmad 2017).
The practice of collaboration is consists of community service entities working
together for achieving shared level of goals. The achievement of collaboration is possible,
when company develops the mechanism such as skills, processes and structures for bridging
the interpersonal and organization differences and arriving together at the outcome, which is
valued by them. The highly productive and effective workplace is possible through the
teamwork. The benefits of collaborative working are manifold and it can have major impact
on project’s outcome (Hustedt and Danken 2017). Following are most vital benefits of
teamwork in the organization:
 Increased level of creativity as well as out of the box thinking.
 Increased level of flexibility.
 Increased possibilities of learning.
 Higher productivity of employees.
The examples of teamwork are as follows:
 The first example of teamwork is rotation of the leadership. This gives chance to
various people in order to test their leadership skills. This level of exposure and
collaboration results into strong leadership of company (Korzilius, Bücker and
Beerlage 2017).
 In case of Aldi UK, each of the member of team contributes as well as each
contributor plays vital role towards their own individual strength. They communicate,
collaborate and brainstorm on each and everything. The company’s team uses each
other as sounding board and any idea generated is not criticized and ignored (Singh
2014).

7INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
Financial Management and Its Importance
Financial management is the area of business management that is devoted towards
judicious uses of the capital and careful selection of capital source for enabling spending unit
to move in the direction of achieving goals. It is operational activities of business, which is
responsible for obtaining and utilizing required funds for the efficient operations. It is
considered to be organic function of the business. The entity requires finances for obtaining
physical resources, carrying out the activities of production and the other operations of
business, paying compensation to suppliers and others. In developed market, most of the
businesses raises the capital in easy manner (Shapiro and Hanouna 2019). However, main
problem is efficient utilization of capital by effective financial control and planning. In
addition, the business is require to ensure that it is dealing with the tasks such as ensuring
funds availability, allocation of it, management, investment, costs controlling, forecasting
financial requirements, profits planning and estimating the returns on investment, working
capital assessment and others (Burtonshaw-Gunn 2017). Following are the points that shows
importance of financial management:
 It helps entities in the financial planning.
 It helps in assisting entities in planning and acquisitions of the funds.
 It helps the entities in effectively allocating and utilizing received or acquired funds.
 It helps the entities for making critical financial decisions.
 It helps to improve organizational profitability.
 It helps in providing economic stability.
 It encourages the employees for saving money that helps them in the personal
financial planning (Finkler, Smith and Calabrese 2018).

8INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
Financial Reporting and its Purposes
Financial reporting are considered to be bedrocks of the modern business. It is
referred as standard practices for giving stakeholders the accurate depiction of the entity’s
finances, capital, expenses, revenues, profits and the cash flows, as the formal records, which
helps in providing greater in-sights into the financial information. Financial reporting helps to
demonstrate overall company’s health (Frias‐Aceituno, Rodríguez‐Ariza and Garcia‐Sánchez
2014). It offers much of insights regarding entity’s structure of management and its culture.
The key purpose of financial reporting is providing information regarding financial position,
performances and changes in entity’s financial position. This is beneficial and important for
the wider ranges of users in order to make economic decisions (Nobes 2014). Hence,
following are the financial reports that are prepared by the company:
Balance Sheet
Balance sheet is the statement of business financial position, which lists liabilities,
assets and the equity of owners at particular time-period. In the other words, it illustrates net
worth of business. It have details from the previous years so that back to back comparison
can be done of the two consecutive years. Further, data shown on this helps in tracking the
performance and identifying the ways for building up the finance and seeing where the
improvement can be done. In case of Aldi UK, balance sheet statement are prepared at end of
each financial year. This company reports and discloses the financial information to the users
and their stakeholders (Aldi.co.uk. 2020).
Profit & Loss Statement
Profit & Loss statement is the financial report that helps in providing summary of the
entity’s expenses, profit or losses and expenses over given period of the time. The statement
of profit & loss demonstrates ability of the company for generating sales, managing the

9INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
expenses as well as creating the profits. Moreover, preparation of it is based on principles of
accounting, which includes accruals, matching and revenue recognition. The Profit & Loss
statement is prepared by Aldi UK at end of every financial year and they discloses it to the
users (Aldi.co.uk. 2020).
Conclusion
Therefore, this assignment concludes that the departments of organization such as
marketing, HR and finance perform their functions and duties for the entity. Moreover,
teamwork is vital as this helps employees for working in collaborative environment. Further,
financial management is vital practice as this helps in effectively dealing with financial
resources of firm for the achievement of business objective. At last, it can be said that main
purpose of financial reporting is for communicating financial information and results with
their users.

10INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
Reference
Aldi.co.uk. 2020. ALDI UK | Homepage. [online] Available at: https://www.aldi.co.uk/
[Accessed 21 Jan. 2020].
Burtonshaw-Gunn, S.A., 2017. Risk and financial management in construction. Routledge.
Cummings, T.G. and Worley, C.G., 2014. Organization development and change. Cengage
learning.
Daft, R.L., 2015. Organization theory and design. Cengage learning.
Finkler, S.A., Smith, D.L. and Calabrese, T.D., 2018. Financial management for public,
health, and not-for-profit organizations. CQ Press.
Frias‐Aceituno, J.V., Rodríguez‐Ariza, L. and Garcia‐Sánchez, I.M., 2014. Explanatory
factors of integrated sustainability and financial reporting. Business strategy and the
environment, 23(1), pp.56-72.
Hustedt, T. and Danken, T., 2017. Institutional logics in inter‐departmental coordination:
Why actors agree on a joint policy output. Public Administration, 95(3), pp.730-743.
Korzilius, H., Bücker, J.J. and Beerlage, S., 2017. Multiculturalism and innovative work
behavior: The mediating role of cultural intelligence. International Journal of Intercultural
Relations, 56, pp.13-24.
Laeeque, S.H., Babar, S.F. and Ahmad, H.M., 2017. The integrative determinants of
innovation performance: The role of learning organization and knowledge creation.
Nobes, C., 2014. International classification of financial reporting. Routledge.
Shapiro, A.C. and Hanouna, P., 2019. Multinational financial management. Wiley.

11INTRODUCTION TO BUSINESS
Singh, A.K., 2014. Role of interpersonal communication in organizational
effectiveness. International Journal of Research in Management and Business Studies, 1(4),
pp.36-39.
Vanblaere, B. and Devos, G., 2018. The role of departmental leadership for professional
learning communities. Educational administration quarterly, 54(1), pp.85-114.