CPA Board Exam October 2016 - Advanced Accounting
October 1, 2016
Unlike in the previous board exams, AdvAcc was our first battle. A few May 2016 passers that I have met in my first job interview (this was around June 2016) informed me that many questions in their AdvAcc exam were reportedly taken from CRC-ACE preweek. I strongly believed then that BOA will consider another review center this time and it turned out they did. Several theory questions (and probably some situational ones as well) were similar from the preweek of ReSA. My roommates and I are all from CPAR but we were still able to get copies of the preweeks and preboards of other review centers. Here are some tidbits I remembered from the exam:
• Questions about business combination of SMEs are plenty; they are mostly theories about the treatment of transaction costs.
• Government Accounting has only one theory question (which is super easy, btw). NPO Accounting has theory questions about the different types of funds.
• Situational problems include accounting for joint and by-products.
• No computational problems about the other special topics (accounting for insurance contracts by insurers and accounting for build, operate and transfer) are included, only theories that require basic knowledge.
• Reconciling HO and Branch Accounts is one of my favorite type of accounting problems to solve. However, HO and Branch problems require the beginning or ending balance of the reciprocal accounts (which is more time-consuming to solve) and the entries to update HO/Branch book for profit or loss of Branch.
• Problems about Long-term Construction Contracts (LTCC) involve 3 years of completion requiring the percentage of completion for each year using only the given figures (e.g. revenue, cost incurred, gross profit). Extracting (or squeezing) is a very important skill to hone in this kind of situations.
• Don't forget the variances (e.g. MPV, MQV, LEV, LRV); they are the easiest to solve in AdvAcc (surely, you cannot not get a correct answer with variances!).
• Forex! As I have heard from my fellow examinees that day, many of the Forex questions in our exam are similar to ReSA's materials.
The problems do not seem to be intimidating; they rather look familiar (if you practiced answering a lot of reviewers, that is).
[This is a six-parts blog post. Details about the remaining subjects are to be posted soon.]