For the CPA Program • Core subject
Strategic Management Accounting for the CPA Program, cut to 62 pages of notes, 74 flashcards, a two-page cheat sheet and a 106-mark practice exam, so you study what carries the marks. Packs $45 to $120 AUD, instant PDF download.
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About the subject
Strategic Management Accounting is a core subject of the CPA Program. This study guide covers how the management accountant supports strategy: analysing value, building budgets and forecasts, managing projects, and measuring performance.
The exam mixes multiple choice, multiple response and extended response, and most questions are built around a business scenario. You have to take a tool, a variance formula, a budgeting method, a performance framework, and apply it to a company you have never seen before. The notes are built for that: the ideas and the formulas first, then how to use them in the exam.
The subject splits into six modules. The notes match the exam, so the parts worth the most marks get the most of your time.
What's inside
Three parts that work together. Learn it in the notes, drill it with the exam, lock it in with the cards.
The whole subject rewritten in plain English, the way a colleague who passed last year would explain it.
Fifty multiple choice, six multiple response and five extended-response questions, built around real scenarios and written for an open-book exam.
The last-week toolkit. Quick recall on the go, and one quick reference sheet for the open-book exam.
A look inside
This is the actual work, not a description of it. Genuine pieces from the notes, flashcards, cheat sheet and exam, so you can see the quality before you spend a cent. It is a taste. The full pack goes a lot deeper.
Strategic management accounting is management accounting with an outward and forward focus. It supplies information on competitors, customers, markets and the firm's own costs to help form and carry out strategy, rather than only recording internal historical results.
The exact wording to use, pulled out so you cannot miss it.
Every formula, rule and framework, laid out for fast lookup in the open-book exam.
Together they show the competitive pressure, and so the likely profitability, of an industry.
Define a value driver and a cost driver.
A value driver is a factor that raises what customers will pay, such as design, quality, delivery speed or service. A cost driver is a factor that causes cost to be incurred. Strategy aims to widen the gap between the two.
Print double-sided, cut, and drill them anywhere.
| Variance | Formula |
|---|---|
| Material price | (AP - SP) x AQ |
| Material usage | (AQ - SQ) x SP |
| Labour rate | (AR - SR) x AH |
Plus labour efficiency and the overhead variances, each with when it is favourable.
Do not pick the project with the highest IRR when projects are mutually exclusive or differ in size. The defensible choice is the highest NPV. Examiners build scenarios where IRR and NPV point to different projects precisely to test this.
Tips and traps sit right where people slip, so you learn the mistake before you make it.
Do not present participative budgeting as all upside. The marks are in the balance: it builds commitment and uses local knowledge, but it invites budgetary slack and can be slow. A one-sided answer reads as a list learned by rote.
The notes tell you how the marks are awarded, not just what the topic is.
At a review, a project's earned value is $100,000, its planned value is $120,000 and its actual cost is $110,000. The project is:
Fifty multiple choice, six multiple response and five extended response, every one worked through.
Earned value below planned value gives a negative schedule variance, so the project is behind schedule, and earned value below actual cost gives a negative cost variance, so it is over budget.
Earned value is below both planned value and actual cost, so the project is neither ahead nor under. The figures differ, so it is not on schedule or on budget. And it is behind schedule, not ahead, since earned value is below planned value.
Every question is marked up like this. The five extended-response questions come with a model answer and the marking guide, so you can see exactly where the marks sit.
And this is a sample. The full pack has all 62 pages, 74 cards, the cheat sheet, and the complete 106-mark exam with worked solutions.
Made for studying after work
You are fitting this around a full-time job. The notes are cut down so your study time goes to the parts that earn marks, not to re-reading the textbook.
Six modules of material sorted into what gets tested and what does not.
The modules that carry the most marks get the most space. The rest is kept short.
Worked solutions show how to take a principle and answer a scenario you have not seen.
Choose your pack
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For revision when you know the theory and want to practise under exam conditions.
Everything for the subject, from first read to the final open-book exam.
For learning the subject from scratch and building recall.
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