Passing your professional accounting exams on a budget

Funding your way through a professional accountancy qualification is difficult, especially with cost of living pressures.

Typically, it is the norm that your employer will sponsor the costs of your training and related fees when doing your professional accountancy exams.

However, based on my experience and interactions with students, this isn’t always the case for various reasons that I will discuss in a different article.

A training course is likely to be the safest and quickest bet, but I’m aware that many students just simply don’t have the funds for this option. Thankfully, there are ways around this, but it does take more self-discipline.

I can attest that it is possible to do all of your exams in the way described below, as I was a self studier many years ago on a very slim budget and used these methods myself.

Materials:

Before getting into the methodology, let’s break down what you will need to do the exam and pass:

• Exam registration
• Textbook (digital or printed)
• Questions
• Stationary

Realistically, you can’t negotiate or discount the exam registration fee.

The textbook is the minimum study material you will need to purchase. Most official textbooks are pretty cheap, and you can save money on your purchases using discount codes (for example, OpenTuition has a 20% discount code on ACCA and CIMA BPP Textbooks).

Question kits or digital question packs can be purchased, but this is a “nice to have”. You can create your own questions if you are really on a strict budget. We will talk more about this later on in the article.

Regarding stationary, I used my word processor for all of my workings because it was cheaper than buying notepads that I would end up throwing out. Not everyone likes this style of studying though, so you will need to guage this one for yourself.

Method:

You will need to break your study into three equal waves.

Wave 1 (33% of your study time)

The first wave involves covering the theory for the relevant subject. You simply go through the textbook and the worked illustrations to do this. You don’t need to do any practice questions at this early stage. Some people like to make summary notes or highlight important content, others simply prefer reading the content. The method you should use is the one that is personally most effective for understanding the key theory.

Wave 2 (33% of your study time)

After wave one is finished, you must go into wave two straight away. This wave is all about practising questions topic by topic. Do as many questions from within the textbook as possible. To get more questions out of your book, you can type existing questions and solutions into ChatGPT and prompt it to rewrite the question with new numbers. You can also ask it to create derivative questions so that you can test another aspect of the material you are looking at.

Wave 3 (33% of your study time)

Wave three involves doing past papers and mock exams. Thankfully, most accounting bodies provide specimen papers or past exam papers for free that you can use to test yourself. Start off by testing yourself with unlimited time. Halfway through this wave, start practising under timed conditions. Always compare your answers with the suggested solution.

If your accountancy body does not provide you with a simulator to practice past questions, simply create your own simulator using free tools that your operating system provides. This could include having the MS Calculator open with MS Word and MS Excel. You can use this clock as a countdown.

For any questions you are getting wrong, you will need to go back to the textbook and relearn the fundamental material. If you have the money, you can buy mock paper packs from tuition providers, but this is not wholly necessary. Like above, you can prompt ChatGPT to create derivative questions based on real papers so that you can test yourself repeatidly (be sure to feed ChatGPT the original question and the solution so it understands the logic of your input).

Once you have run out of questions, you can create your own questions without AI by simply rephrasing existing questions.

For example, if you are doing a financial reporting paper and the question asks you to generate the investment in an associate figure, ask yourself what the share of the profit of an associate would be in that same circumstance.

Conclusion:

If you are a self studier funding your own way through your professional accountancy qualification, I hope this advice was useful. It is important to note that doing a course is still likely the fastest way of getting through your papers, and some people enjoy having a fixed timetable, students to talk to, and an expert tutor to interact with.

Everyone is in a different position and should pick the right tuition products for their circumstance and preference.