The ACA Advanced level Corporate Reporting (CR) exam is one of the final three exams sat by ACA candidates.
The Corporate Reporting exam builds on the technical accounting fundamentals which are developed during the earlier certificate level Accounting exam and the professional level Financial Accounting and Reporting exam.
This paper is much more technical than the previous accounting papers, which should be expected, and introduces some new and complex areas of accounting, such as hedge accounting and deferred tax.
The CR exam is very applicable to everyday work, especially if you work in audit. As such, I found the exam interesting on the whole, and although there are difficult elements to the syllabus, I enjoyed learning the content required to complete the exam.
Overview of ACA Corporate Reporting Exam
| SYLLABUS AREA | WEIGHTING |
| Corporate Reporting – Compliance Corporate Reporting – Financial Statement Analysis | 55-65% |
| Audit and Assurance | 30-40% |
| Ethics | 5-10% |
Method of assessment
The ACA Corporate Reporting exam itself is 3.5 hours and given it forms part of the Advanced level, it can only be sat in one of two exam periods. These are in July and November each year.
As such, in each exam sitting all candidates will be set the same questions.
The exam will consist of 3 questions. Each of these questions will be integrated, meaning that more than one area of the syllabus and are likely to include ethics. Students are likely to get one question on preparation of financial statements, one question on explaining accounting treatment and one question on audit and assurance procedures. The weighting of the marks allocated to these questions is as shown in the table above.
How to pass ACA Corporate Reporting Exam
There are a few key tips I give to students when they are faced with the CR exam:
Firstly, make sure that your notes are VERY organised and so when you need to reference a certain accounting standard during the exam they are easy to find. This can be a lifesaver during the time pressure of the exam. I liked to have summary sheets with each accounting standard along with an overview as to what each standard requires.
In addition, I would advise spending more time really learning the content of this exam. By this I mean rather than attempting question bank questions from an early stage, I would spend longer than I would in other exams going over and over the content to make sure you really understand each area before moving on to practice questions.
Lastly, make sure that you are very comfortable with the audit and assurance questions. I would advise completing all of the question bank questions prior to the exam. This is because these are generally quite formulaic, and so with enough practice you can learn how to score maximum marks for these questions, which can be huge given they could be worth 40% of the total exam.
How hard is the ACA Corporate Reporting Exam?
This exam represents a clear step up in difficulty when compared with the prior Accounting and FAR exams. In my opinion this is the second hardest ACA exam, just behind BPT.
I would give this exam a 4 out of 5 for difficulty.
The pass rate for this exam is 81.93%
