What the Fundamental Case Study Pre-Populated Spreadsheets Told You in March and June 2026

The pre-populated spreadsheet is easy to treat as a convenience, a bit of formatting done for you so that you do not waste exam time typing out headings. It is better understood as part of the question. In both 2026 sittings the spreadsheet followed the Advance Information closely enough to be worth studying weeks before the exam, and in both sittings it contained a detail that cost careless candidates marks.

What was in them

In March, Teakmore's spreadsheet had two sheets.

The first held a proforma statement of profit or loss for the year ended 28 February 2026, laid out line for line like the prior year statement printed in the Advance Information: revenue, cost of sales, gross profit, administrative expenses, distribution costs, operating profit, income tax and profit for the year. Nothing was hidden and nothing was added. If you had practised the March adjustments against the Advance Information’s own prior year statement, the proforma held no surprises at all.

The second sheet held the Tabicha pricing and cost data that the exam paper had promised: the selling price, the variable cost per unit, and the two new fixed costs, being £200,000 of production overheads and £400,000 for the online selling platform. Everything needed for the breakeven, margin of safety and profit calculations was there, laid out and ready. The Advance Information had already told you this was coming, in the sentence explaining that Kelly wanted to establish whether the Tabicha would break even in its first year.

June's Alto spreadsheet also had two working sheets, each with a locked backup copy sitting alongside it.

The first gave the Manchester labour data: standard rates of £19.00 an hour for front desk staff and £14.50 for porters, standard person hours per day of 56 and 80 respectively, and actual figures of 1,388 hours costing £27,691 for front desk and 2,395 hours costing £36,997 for porters. The second sheet was a blank statement of financial position proforma, again mirroring the prior year layout printed in the Advance Information, right down to the deferred income line in current liabilities.

That last detail is a small lesson in itself. The proforma said deferred income, but the model answer presented the balance as a contract liability, reflecting the language of IFRS 15. Either label was acceptable. The proforma is a guide to structure, not a script you must follow word for word.

What to take from it

The expected part is the proformas themselves. Both sittings handed you a skeleton that matched the Advance Information, which means you could have practised filling one in months earlier, using the prior year figures as a starting point and inventing your own adjustments. If your figures do not fit the headings you have been given, something has gone wrong somewhere upstream, and the proforma is telling you so.

The surprise sits in the detail of the June data. You were given standard hours per day, not for the four-week period, so the efficiency variance only worked if you first multiplied by 28 days. The examiners confirmed that failing to gross up the standard hours was the most common error on the requirement, which meant the efficiency variance could not be derived correctly however good the rest of the method was. That is eight marks of calculation undermined by one missing multiplication.

March contained a comparable trap. The breakeven volume came out at 2,926.83 units, which had to be rounded up to a whole product before the margin of safety made sense. Candidates who left the decimal in place, or who divided by the breakeven quantity rather than budgeted sales when calculating margin of safety, gave away marks on a requirement the examiners otherwise described as very well answered.

Both traps share a characteristic. Neither is a knowledge problem. Both are about reading the units and the labels on the data you have been given, and asking whether the number in the cell is the number the formula needs.

Both sittings also warned that the spreadsheet might contain formulae, and June supplied a backup sheet that could be copied but not edited. Treat that as a hint about method. Check what is calculated and what is hard-coded before building on top of it, and leave the original data intact so that you can start a working again if it goes wrong. Overwriting the only copy of the data under time pressure is a bad ten minutes.

Two habits follow from all this.

First, practise with the published spreadsheets rather than a blank page. ICAEW releases the files after each sitting, including a completed version showing the model workings, so you can attempt a requirement cold and then mark yourself against the way the examiner laid it out.

Second, remember the instruction printed on the front of every paper: only the data in the answer area is marked. Workings left sitting in the spreadsheet area earn nothing at all unless you copy them across, and every sitting produces candidates who build a perfect answer and then fail to move it. Copy as you go rather than leaving it to the end, because the end is exactly when you will run out of time.