HOW TO PASS ICAEW BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY & FINANCE (BTF) ACA EXAM #Finance

hey guys welcome back to the CashNews.co i’m luke i’m a third year training accountant at one of the big four Accounting firms in london training towards the aca qualification and in today’s CashNews.co i want to run through some advice and some tips to

help you guys pass the business technology and Finance exam now the business technology and #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance exam is one of your certificate level exams it’s made up of 50 multi-choice questions and you have 90 minutes to complete the paper i’d say it’s one of the more straightforward aca exams there’s no scenario-based question

like there is in Accounting or in principles of tax and the actual content in business Finance tends to be quite intuitive and straightforward as well and

people with backgrounds in Finance economics Accounting degrees tend to do quite well in this exam as well because of its overlap with general

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance concepts and like i said people tend to do quite well in this exam that’s reflected in the pass rate the typical pass rate for business technology and

href="https://cashnews.co/finance" style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance is around 90 so the majority of people who sit this paper go on to pass but if you are struggling with this exam i want to run through some tips and some advice to help

structure your revision strategy prepare you for the actual exam itself and set you well on your way to passing and moving on to the next certificate level exam so my first piece of advice from studying towards this exam and something you should be really aware of is that this exam requires a lot

of rote learning it’s quite different to some of the other Accounting Accounting-based exams tax-based exams you will have done which have a lot of concepts and require a lot of deeper understanding how certain calculations work how certain tax and

Accounting treatments work so you really have to develop that underlying understanding in those exams whereas business technology and Finance is much more

content it requires you instead to rote learn a lot of definitions concepts and business processes so what i did and what my advice to you would be is to just focus on rote learning is to use flash cards to rote learn a lot of the content in this exam when you’re going through the notes for

the first time don’t spend you know two or three goes just reading the notes trying to understand it be very proactive with your learning in this module and use things like flash cards or whatever works best for you to actively learn like i said there’s not really that many concepts you

have to get a deep thorough understanding of it’s more just learn and churn a lot of rote learning so in the initial stages of your studying don’t spend time writing long form notes keep it really succinct like i said flashcards are a really useful tool to use for this exam it’s

exactly what i used to just wrote learn those definitions processes ideas and concepts when you move on to the question bank practice you already have a decent level of knowledge that you’ll be able to apply to the questions my second piece of advice follows on from my first tip and that is

to not spend loads and loads of time going through the notes of this exam question practice is going to be really key here so you want to get into the question bank into the end of chapter study manual questions as soon as possible because that’s really going to add that extra layer of

understanding and knowledge to what you’ve already accumulated through making your flash cards and going through your initial learning phase i also feel like this module is quite intuitive and if you have a general level of business

style="font-weight: bold; color: #1a73e8; text-decoration: none;">Finance understanding if you keep up to date with current affairs the concepts in this module should come to you quite naturally and like i said it’s quite intuitive so i would say start practicing exam questions

in the question bank two weeks before the exam just start getting into questions nice and early and if there are any topics or chapter areas that you struggle with you can always go back to the notes and do a deeper dive on that section at a later point but i think dipping into the question bank

quite early will help you gain a foothold and gain an understanding of what areas you’re good at what areas you’re not so good at and then you can strategize your revision by focusing on the areas in the notes that you struggle with much more rather than going over things that you

understand quite well in the first place my third piece of advice is to not neglect the technological aspect of business technology and Finance now the technological element

is a new element to this exam a few years ago it used to just be called business Finance and there was no tech element at all in the module so the icw introduced the tech

element of the exam which makes up around 15 of the marks only a few years back and this is areas such as big data assimilating information data security and i think what you’ll find is because it’s a new section it’s a new area of the exam and you’ll see that the icw are

going to want to actively test it at this early stage see if students are putting enough emphasis into it in their revision so please don’t neglect it make sure you proportion enough time in your revision phase to learn all the different technological aspects go through all the technological

questions in the question bank and as i said previously the technology element makes up 15 of the exam so it’s quite a big weighting and if you can master it it’s actually quite straightforward so that could be 15 easy marks going towards your 55 past mark my fourth piece of advice is

to not neglect the corporate responsibility corporate governance and sustainability element of the exam so the icaw say this makes up around 10 of the exam i remember when i sat it i’m sure the actual exam itself had around 30 to 35 maybe even 40 corporate government sustainability and

corporate responsibility in it but again i think this is quite deliberate by the icaw because a lot of students neglect this area because it’s quite boring there’s a lot of rote learning here there’s a lot of facts and figures you need to remember you need to remember things such

as how many non-exec directors can sit on a board compared to the number of executive directors there’s a lot of these quite monotonous facts and figures and pieces of information which a lot of people just can’t be bothered to learn having been through the exam myself i can actually

tell you that this came up around 10 to 15 questions in my exam so it was a huge part of the exam and i know a lot of people i studied with really struggled with it because they hadn’t bothered to learn it so again like i said it’s a bit boring it’s a bit of a pain to learn this

kind of stuff but i’m telling you it comes up so don’t neglect it plan for a day or two of revision wrote learning the information in these chapters in the notes and if it comes up you’ll be more than prepared to ace that section my final piece of advice is don’t be afraid

to bring in real world knowledge and just general common sense when answering some of these questions in the exam the questions will often include a scenario where you’ll have to respond to a certain business situation or business challenge and the answer might not always seem black and white

with the options you’re given and you may not remember from the notes the exact technique or the exact response that you should put down but just use common sense think about real world scenarios rural businesses real world challenges um things like brexit that are going on in the news keep

up to date with current affairs and issues like that it will help you retain a lot of the knowledge that you’re learning in this module and be able to apply it in the exam itself so keep up to date with current affairs so there you go guys that’s my advice to help you pass the business

technology and Finance exam on the aca qualification this exam’s quite straightforward a lot of people do quite well in it but by focusing on key topic areas getting

into question bank practice early and using study techniques that help you retain the information in the notes will really help you assimilate the knowledge and be able to apply it when you’re faced with questions in the exam itself in terms of the exam it’s not particularly time

pressured it’s not one of the more time pressured exams that i came across there’s no scenario based question so you’re not going to worry about anything like that it’s purely multi-choice there’ll be a few multi-step questions in there where you’ve got to get

both parts of the multi-choice question right to pass but don’t rush the exam take your time to think about answers when you’re on a question take time to go through each of the four multi-choice options and deduce why the answer you’ve selected is right but also if you need to

confirm that the other three answers are wrong if you’ve got the time and then also make sure you don’t leave early stay at the end if you’ve got time to come back and go through your exam paper again the software’s got functionality for you to flag questions that you may be

unsure about so you can come back during the exam to those questions just to review them one more time i often think that looking at a question for a second time after you know half an hour break having not seen it for about half an hour and give you a much clearer picture of whether the answer you

put makes sense whether it stacks up against the other multi-choice options in the question so if you’ve got the exam coming up i wish you the best of luck sure go absolutely fine if you like this CashNews.co please smash the like button it really helps throughout the channel and allow these

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to answer them and i’ll see you guys in the next CashNews.co