Pre-populated spreadsheets and Case Study

ICAEW is streamlining the Case Study exam with a new twist – pre-populated spreadsheets.

Requirement 1

From the July 2025 sitting, candidates will no longer need to spend precious exam minutes formatting and crunching the management accounts numbers to create their Appendix 1 overview.

Instead, candidates will be provided with the £k and % variances in the main figures from the profit or loss account, allowing candidates to channel their energy into critical analysis and narrative writing.

This change mirrors the approach already seen in the Business Strategy and Technology and Strategic Business Management modules where ICAEW have sought to reduce the amount of time spent on basic number-crunching work.

The benefits are clear. First, with Appendix 1 now pre-populated, candidates are freed from the tedious task of manually recreating the movement in revenue, gross profit, and cost of sales.

This time saving isn’t just about reducing workload—it’s about reallocating valuable exam time towards deeper analytical tasks (such as assessing Key Performance Indicators which may still have to be calculated manually, based on hints in the Advance Information).

In a high-pressure exam setting, every minute counts, and this upgrade is designed to reduce time pressure and enhance overall exam performance.

Requirement 2 and Requirement 3

The change also extends to financial models within Requirements 2 and 3. In each exam sitting, one of these Requirements will feature the results of a financial model already calculated and formatted, eliminating the need for candidates to replicate that work.

However, the twist is that only one of these requirements benefits from a pre-populated approach. For the other, candidates must still create a full model from scratch just as used to be required for both Requirement 2 and Requirement 3 prior to the July 2025 sitting.

A minor change ... but beneficial for students!

ICAEW have stressed that the introduction of pre-populated spreadsheets is intended to be a minor change, primarily aimed at reducing the manual number-crunching that can sap time and energy.

The content and quality of candidate responses will remain the focus, with the markscheme updated simply to remove marks for calculations that are now provided. Otherwise, candidates should attack the examination in the exactly the same way as before.

ICAEW will be releasing amended versions of some recent past papers so that students have plenty of content to practise.

Our resources

For those gearing up for the new format, rest assured that we’ve updated our materials as required.

To fully master these changes, all the updates are thoroughly covered in our Introduction to Case Study, Case Study Masterclass (July 2025) and Case Study Masterclass (November 2025) courses – available either as standalone purchases or within our Advanced Level subscription package.