The ACA is unique amongst UK accountancy qualifications in that you’re allowed to take your own notes and books into certain "open book" examinations.
Sounds great, right? While there are certainly many benefits, there are also a few pitfalls you’ll need to avoid too, which is where our Exam Room Notes come in.
They’re specially designed to provide quick access to all the content you require, without causing you to lose track of the most important thing in any exam – time!
By preparing our sensibly organised, alphabetically-arranged notes, we can also save you the huge amount of time that would be required to create your own notes ... and, as experienced tutors, we can add our own tips and advice to help you further.
Although primarily designed as an exam day resource (hence the name!), many students have commented that they found our Exam Room Notes to be a very useful pre-exam revision resource as well, so you may wish to consider our Exam Room Notes as part of your general revision resources too.
At the Professional Level, we provide Exam Room Notes for the Business Planning: Taxation paper.
Unfortunately, we cannot provide Exam Room Notes for the other Professional Level examinations as only the "Business Planning" papers are treated as "open book" by ICAEW, sorry!
Scroll down the page to learn more about our Exam Room Notes.
Yes, you can and you must because ICAEW does not allow use of any electronic materials other than ICAEW content (via Bibliu). You will therefore need to print a hardcopy if you wish to use the content during the examination.
You will receive instant access straight after payment: the content can be downloaded directly from our system so there is no need to wait for an email from us or to wait for anything really! This means you can get straight into your studies and there is no risk of any delay due to Junk Mail folders or similar issues.
The PDF is downloaded to your device in the same way as for a standard PDF. You therefore do not need to be connected to the internet or logged into our website to access the content. The file is a standalone PDF that you can simply view in your choice of PDF viewer.
Many employers allow their employees to print study-related materials free of charge so you may wish to explore this option. Our PDF can be transferred onto a USB stick or emailed to another email address in the usual way.
Other students have in the past sent the PDF to a family member for printing.
You are also welcome to use an online or local printing shop to print the document, provided that they only print a single copy for your own personal use.
We understand that many students do not have a printer at home so we are happy to allow transfer of the PDF on the above basis, on condition that you ask whoever is doing the printing to delete the file after use.
To be clear: you are not permitted to print the PDF for other students. You are purchasing an individual licence to use the materials for your sole and exclusive use, so printing the document for another user would be a breach of UK copyright law in the same way that photocopying a book and handing it to another student would be illegal (and very unfair on the author!). Please do not do this as it makes it harder for us to support students in future and to develop new products and approaches.
Whenever we mention the "open book" nature of some ACA papers to our non-accountant friends, we are often told that this makes the exams too easy. Not quite!
Having access to unlimited notes sounds great, but the more notes you have, the more searching you'll be doing, so if you do not have the right resource, there is definitely a risk of "losing more than you gain" from your open book notes.
With this in mind, all our Exam Room Notes books have been carefully designed for quick alphabetical reference to provide all the answers you need in double-quick speed.
We have also largely relied on the available ICAEW past paper and Mock model answers, rather than trying to summarise everything in the Workbook, when creating our Exam Room Notes. This ensures that we focus on the most examinable content, again saving you precious time.
We review the 30 most recent ICAEW past paper model answer files as part of the process of writing each set of Exam Room Notes, ensuring that any content which has been recently examined definitely features in our notes, ensuring relevance of our content
We have split the Business Planning: Taxation syllabus into just over 100 different topic areas, all organised alphabetically. This allows you to go straight to the specific information that you need with laser-guided precision, rather than losing time hunting for info.
Our Exam Room Notes save you time both before and during the examination through sensibly organised, summarised notes which incorporate our expert tutor guidance on the likely mark allocation, typical student errors to avoid and other tips.
We have carefully worked through all the syllabus changes for 2024 (as well as the key learning points from model answers to the latest 2023 past papers) to ensure that the latest editions of our Exam Room Notes are fully up-to-date.
Rather than relying on the large number of Workbook chapters (yet another cause of "overwhelm" for students), all content in our Exam Room Notes has been organised alphabetically, meaning that you can instantly go to the information that you need.
To give you the maximum chance of developing your points in the right way, we always provide direct page cross-references to other topic areas within the Exam Room Notes which may be useful to your answer. This allows our Exam Room Notes to serve as a kind of "ideas stimulator" so that you don't forget to include the further follow-on points needed to max your score.
I won the AB Snow Regional Prize for Corporate Reporting at the August 2020 sitting with a score of 86%! Feel I should write in as I used all your Exam Room Notes books for 2020. I found them easy to follow as I used them every day since I bought them. They're logically written and very useful for quick referencing. As I barely have any time to study (my employer does not provide any allocated study time), they saved me a lot of time compared to compiling notes.
I purchased the Exam Room Notes a month or two ago and they have worked wonders for revision. I really like the way the notes cut straight to the point of what the examiners are looking for.
I'm hoping your Case Study materials do the trick - they usually do! BPT, FM, SBM & CR! I go to tuition with [XXXXXX] but find the materials you provide to be far superior!
Thank you so much for writing these Case Study Mocks (particularly during these unprecedented times). I have used your materials for BPT and all my Advanced Level exams and have always found them incredibly helpful!
I am emailing to say a big thank you to your team. I used your services over the last 2 years (SBM Exam Room Notes, BPT/BST TIS) and attended a Case Study Masterclass. You guys are really knowledgeable and I've really appreciated your help along the way to getting qualified. Will continue to recommend your services to junior associates coming through the ranks.
The notes have been extremely beneficial to me whilst revising for BPT, they have a very good way of cutting through the bulk of my college notes and making topics much more straightforward than they seem initially.
I am currently preparing for the 3 Advanced Level papers for the July 2019 sitting and have bought your Exam Room Notes for CR (both books) and SBM. I previously used your BPT Exam Room Notes and similar to that resource, I think they're really great.
I just sat all 3 Advanced exams this week. I purchased every RRQB and Exam Room Notes book you published (my workplace pays for tuition with another provider). I wanted to say thank you for the high quality materials that you have put together. I found these extremely useful and hopefully it's resulted in 3 passes. The books were all very reasonably priced too.
I have purchased the RRQB and Exam Room Notes for the Corporate Reporting Exam, which are proving very helpful
