Chief executive and co-founder at Fieldnote
About 65 minutes. Included in Plus.
The board pack says the company spends 70,000 dollars a month; the January ledger says more, and the board meets on Friday. Build the runway statement from the ledger, cost the ways through the next ninety days and recommend one, and settle with your co-founder what happens to the integration he wants to finish.
Skills: Build a cash figure from the ledger, not the plan; Choose a way through against the goal, not only the cash; Give a co-founder a decision he argued against
Audit associate at Hartwell and Achebe LLP
About 70 minutes. Included in Plus.
Twelve expense claims sit in your sample. Test each against the client's policy, tell control deviations from misstatements, query the client without accusing anyone, and project what you found to the whole year.
Skills: Test transactions against a client policy, attribute by attribute; Tell a control deviation from a misstatement; Query a client for evidence without accusing anyone; Project sample errors and compare them with audit thresholds
Environmental compliance officer at Halbrook Dairies
About 75 minutes. Included in Plus.
A monthly ammonia result is above the permit limit. Decide whether the permit has actually been breached, get a notification signed before the clock runs out, and handle a report of dead fish downstream without guessing or denying.
Skills: Assess compliance against a permit's statistical limits; Separate records from what people remember; Meet a legal notification deadline under pressure; Report facts without speculating about cause; Handle a public pollution report within the rules
Communications manager at Orchard Gold Drinks Ltd
About 70 minutes. Included in Plus.
A mother's video of glass in your best selling juice is spreading, a second customer has posted a photo, a supermarket wants an answer by one, and the managing director wants to say the product is completely safe. Read the situation, issue a careful holding statement, and communicate the recall when it comes.
Skills: Assess the severity of an incident from evidence; Write a holding statement that is accurate and kind; Advise a senior leader against words that will backfire; Communicate a recall clearly to consumers, retailers and media; Work within legal approval and decision rights
Learning and development coordinator at Corran Foods
About 70 minutes. Included in Plus.
Fourteen training requests and a budget that covers about half. Allocate it by the policy, check the compliance dates yourself, say no to a director's favourite course with a real alternative, and re-plan when Finance cuts the budget.
Skills: Allocate a budget by a published order of priority; Check requests against records before funding; Say no to a senior manager with a real alternative; Re-plan quickly when the budget changes
Data analyst at Kibble and Co
About 70 minutes. Included in Plus.
The dashboard says repeat purchases have halved since June and marketing wants 50,000 pounds to win customers back. Check what the number measures, find out what changed in June and what is incomplete, and tell the board what the data really says before it spends the money.
Skills: Check what a measure means before trusting its trend; Separate a mix effect and incomplete periods from real change; Combine rates correctly from counts; Write a board note that leads with the answer; Disagree with a colleague's figures constructively
Facilities and procurement coordinator at Marlow Street Studios
About 85 minutes. Included in Plus.
The office cleaning contract ends in six weeks. Reconcile a year of invoices against the contract and the sign-in log, recommend to your manager whether to renew, negotiate or retender and what needs approval from whom, and put the practice's position to the supplier.
Skills: Reconcile invoiced work against contract terms and site records; Evaluate commercial options under budget and authority constraints; Respect approval limits and escalate the right decision; Communicate a negotiating position to a supplier honestly
Farm assistant, grain store at Hollins Farm Partnership
About 55 minutes. Included in Plus.
Eight lorries are booked for this week's wheat. Check every bin against the contract, decide what needs drying or checking and what that costs, and tell the merchant honestly what is coming.
Skills: Check stored grain against a contract on every measure; Spot a risk in a trend, not just a reading; Compare the cost of acting now with the cost later; Change bookings honestly within authority
Supply planner at Thornbury Kitchenware
About 70 minutes. Included in Plus.
The lead time from Portugal has jumped from six weeks to nine, and the best seller has a big promotion before Christmas. Project the stock, recommend what to do with the costs, and help sales tell the biggest customer the truth.
Skills: Project stock week by week and find a shortfall; Compare supply options on cost, timing and risk; Request approval within purchasing limits; Support honest customer commitments with numbers
Credit analyst at Aldwick Business Bank
About 65 minutes. Included in Plus.
A well run bakery wants a loan for a second oven and a bigger overdraft. The reported figures pass the bank's tests easily. Normalise them, test the request against the credit policy, find a structure that works and hold the line when a contract arrives that does not count.
Skills: Normalise a business's earnings for one-off items; Test a lending request against a credit policy; Recommend a structure that meets policy without losing the customer; Judge whether new evidence changes a credit decision
Investor relations manager at Thornbury Industrial plc
About 75 minutes. Included in Plus.
The internal profit forecast has slipped below what analysts expect, and the company is in its close period. Work out whether the gap triggers the disclosure committee, answer an analyst and a big shareholder without signalling anything, and act fast when the share price moves for no reason.
Skills: Calculate consensus by a defined method; Recognise when a forecast gap triggers disclosure governance; Decline investor requests in a close period without signalling; Spot signs of a leak and escalate at once; Prepare announcement questions and answers within published information
Team leader, Supplier Payments at Brackwell Supplies
About 95 minutes. Included in Plus.
One of your team has met the quality trigger two months running. Read his error rates like for like, plan the foreign-currency work for November, and decide what to tell him and your manager.
Sustainability reporting analyst at Corvane Foods
About 80 minutes. Included in Plus.
Work out a food maker's electricity emissions for the annual report, both ways, with a site sold and a site bought during the year. Then stop marketing overclaiming renewable power, and restate the figure honestly when the certificates come in short.
Skills: Apply a reporting boundary to sites bought and sold; Calculate location-based and market-based Scope 2; Write a disclosure that claims only what the evidence supports; Restate a figure openly when evidence changes; Answer an assurance provider with evidence
Management consultant at Larkspur Partners
About 85 minutes. Included in Plus.
A client's finance director has told his board that closing a depot will save 3.04 million pounds a year. Rebuild the savings from the client's own data, tell the steering committee the true number in a deck, and correct it again when a depot manager's figure turns out to be wrong.
Skills: Separate costs that end from costs that move; Build a savings and payback model from client data; Present an unwelcome number answer first; Handle a client sponsor's expectations with evidence; Revise analysis openly when data changes
Site reliability engineer at Pantry Lane
About 75 minutes. Included in Plus.
Customers could not pay for about an hour and a half on a busy Saturday. Rebuild the timeline and impact from the logs, write a blameless review that fixes conditions rather than people, book the review and brief customer care without promising what you cannot keep.
Skills: Reconstruct an incident timeline from logs and records; Measure customer impact and error budget use; Write a blameless review that names conditions, not people; Turn contributing factors into owned actions; Brief non-engineers honestly about an incident
Software engineer at Gatehouse Tickets
About 60 minutes. Included in Plus.
A colleague's change will issue partial refunds to thousands of festival customers, and all its tests pass because they check the code against itself. Work out the right refunds from the finance policy, review the change, and hold the line on a money bug when the release date is used as pressure.
Skills: Check code against the rule it implements, not its own tests; Work out expected money values exactly from a policy; Write review comments an author can act on; Hold a safety decision under release pressure
Quality technician at Pennant Precision Components
About 75 minutes. Included in Plus.
A batch for the morning truck failed its final check on a machine that has just failed calibration. Decide what the results really show, contain the batch, and tell the customer the facts.
Skills: Interpret inspection data from a suspect measuring instrument; Hold product within quality authority under schedule pressure; Define a containment from in-process records; Write a factual nonconformance report and customer notification
Assistant restaurant manager at The Gannet Kitchen
About 55 minutes. Included in Plus.
The weekly food cost has jumped from 31 to 40.5 percent and head office sees it on Wednesday. Find what is wrong in the records, query the supplier, and explain what is really driving the cost.
Skills: Check purchases and stock records for errors; Calculate a weekly food cost percentage; Query a supplier politely and within authority; Explain the cause of a cost rise with figures and options
Release captain (senior software engineer) at Orla Books
About 80 minutes. Included in Plus.
Release 5.4 must get a new bank feed connector live before an aggregator switches off its old interface on 31 October, but Android crashes, a slow migration and a quarantined test stand in the way. Judge readiness, recommend a plan and roll it out without over-promising.
Skills: Judge release readiness against written criteria and evidence; Separate what a dashboard shows from what the policy counts; Recommend a release plan that protects a hard external deadline; Ask for only the exceptions the policy allows, with reasons; Plan a staged rollout and the communications that depend on it