Studying F7 

F7 is a demanding paper covering all the fundamentals of financial reporting. It has five main sections: 1.  The conceptual framework of accounting 2.  The regulatory framework 3.  Preparation of financial statements which conform with IFRS 4.  Preparation of consolidated financial statements 5.  Analysis and interpretation of financial statements All of these areas will be tested to some degree at each sitting. Sections 3 and 4 are the main areas of 

application and you must expect to have to produce consolidated and single company financial statements in your exam. 

Some of this material you will have covered at lower level papers. You should already be familiar with accounting for inventories and non-current assets and preparing simple income statements, statements of financial position and statements of cash flows. You should know the basic ratios. 

F7 takes your financial reporting knowledge and skills up to the next level. New topics are consolidated financial statements, construction contracts, financial instruments and leases. There is also coverage of the substance of transactions and the limitations of financial statements and ratios. The examiner wants you to think about these issues. 

If you had exemptions from lower level papers or feel that your knowledge of lower level financial reporting is not good enough, you may want to get a copy of the study text for F3 Financial Accounting and read through it, or at least have it to refer to. You have a lot of new material to learn for F7 and basic financial accounting will be assumed knowledge. 

The way to pass F7 is by practising lots of exam-level questions, which you will do when you get onto revision. Only by practising questions do you get a feel for what you will have to do in the exam. Also, topics which you find hard to understand in the text will be much easier to grasp when you have encountered them in a few questions. So don’t get bogged down in any area of the text. Just keep going and a lot of things you find difficult will make more sense when you see how they appear in an exam question.