Financial Statement Exhibits

a225khan

I am having a hard time understanding how to familiarize myself with ALL the financial statement exhibits. While I understand that some of the exhibits are more important than others, I am still unclear on how to study this topic in general.

According to battlequiz 2, I should know the page numbers for each exhibit. So I should memorize the page numbers only ? or should I know the calculations on all these pages as well?

graham

For this reading, I'm using my judgment plus what has appeared on past exams on this topic. Here are a few comments that I hope help:

• First, to address one of your questions: All the calculations you're likely to need to know are in the web-based problems in the various quizzes. The official syllabus states that you're responsible for all the calculations in all the listed pages, but in reality, they are much more likely to test you just a small subset. If after learning the calculations in the quizzes you feel you want to know more, you can study the financial statement exhibits directly but I don't think you'll find much extra testable material.
• When you first start studying this topic, it's probably going to feel like a huge mass of disconnected information. You just have to trust that if you read the wiki article and do the quizzes over a period of a week or so, it will gradually begin to make more sense.
• For the exam, you wouldn't be asked for the page numbers but when I was trying to figure out how to learn it myself (just a few weeks ago, because this is new to everybody) I just felt more secure knowing the page numbers (and titles) for some of the more important exhibits. The exam may reference the page numbers (and titles) when they provide information so being able to recognize page numbers should make you feel more secure on the exam.
• When you're first learning these new financial statements, it will help to narrow your focus to the most important exhibits. That's why I created 2 versions of the "page number" quiz. The easy version selects randomly from a group of 12 exhibits. I would skip the one that has all 24 exhibits the first time through. And you don't even have to get it perfect every time before moving on. Just get a basic familiarity.
• I did the same thing for the "category" web-based problem. The easy one has 39 items while the hard one has 79 items. Just do the easy one the first time through and don't get bogged down here because...
• ...the most important things to learn here are the calculations. If you practice the web-based problems for the actual calculations, you will naturally begin to learn the page numbers and layouts for the important exhibits and that may actually be enough for the exam.
• I erred on the side of going into too much depth in this wiki article because I have no way of knowing what will appear on the exam, but I think there's a pretty good chance that exhibits like "Liability Roll-Forward" won't be tested. They just seem too detailed.

Hope that helps.