Our first midterm for ACC 650 is tomorrow, and I’m just beginning to study today. I KNOW, it’s terrible, but I don’t know how to even study for it. Talking to some friends and classmates, they feel the same way, so that’s comforting at least.
Today’s Classes
ACC 611
I felt much more confident about today’s seminar. Maybe Alyssa’s assurances about our responses improving week after week is coming true, or maybe PPE/intangibles are just easier concepts compared to revenue and financial instruments.
But then later in the day, we got our marks back for our second seminar (financial instruments), and it was 50%!! Lower than our first mark of 62.5% that was the trigger that sent me spiraling into anxiety!! Now I’m anxious all over again re my fears about us not being on the right track and not improving fast enough.
ACC 607
I always start zoning out at the end of these case planning sessions. Once I raise my hand and get my participation mark I have no more motivation to pay attention lol.
Studying for the ACC 650 Midterm
I skimmed through the discussion posts first on our ACC 650 discussion board, trying to glean some insights and tips from classmates.
I also wrote down a couple of things I wanted to remember for the midterm, principally being a template for the audit planning memo and a couple of acronyms to help me with audit procedures (which I find pretty difficult to come up with).
Case Writing
I’ve delayed for long enough, the midterm is literally tomorrow morning, I need to get started on practicing cases for ACC 650 today.
In the end, I only managed to do a half-assed job at the writing and debriefing Autotech today. I’m just so damn lazy. I think the only thing that motivates me to study is fear, and don’t get me wrong, I’m constantly afraid these days of failing out of the program. But I think I’d need to see a really bad mark on the midterm to truly kick my ass into high gear. Which sucks, because I don’t want to have to get a bad mark in the first place!!
Audit Planning Memo Template
The profs posted a document a couple of days ago with Audit Planning Memo formatting examples. I wish they had posted this at the beginning of term because it would’ve been a great help to see a concrete, formulaic approach to case-writing. I’ve been spending too long staring at blank word documents.
Anyway, here’s my summary of the template:
General audit planning issues (eg. going concern, fraud risk
Materiality
- Overall materiality
- Performance materiality
- Specific materiality
- Revising materiality (if necessary)
Risk assessment
- RMM at FSL
- make a table with risk-reducing factors and risk-increasing factors
- (In the Knotia ebook chapter on Risk, I saw that they also separated the factors into inherent risk factors and control risk factors. I probably won’t do that on the midterm for time reasons, since the profs never demonstrated this method and probably aren’t expecting it.)
- RMM at ASL
- identify the WCGW
- identify the assertion (PCRACE) and account affected
- IR level (influenced by IR factor, likelihood, and magnitude)
- CR level (only if there are case facts about the controls)
- conclusion about the level of RMM for the particular assertion
Risk response
- Overall audit strategy (this ties with our assessment of RMM at FSL)
- go with a more substantive approach, or combined approach, and why
- Further audit procedures (this ties with our assessment of RMMs at ASL)
- what (summary of what the procedure will do, eg. recalculate fuel surcharge)
- NET
- Nature = purpose (substantive or toc) and type (IIRROE)
- Extent = sample size
- Timing (ie. at interim date, before or after period end)
- how (details on exactly how the procedure will be carried out, eg. select a sample of fuel charge transactions, lookup market prices for gasoline, recalculate the fuel surcharge using the market price on the date of the transaction)
Acronyms
The two acronyms I developed to help me remember the different assertions and types of procedures:
- PCRACE (Presentation, Classification, Rights/Obligations, Accuracy/Valuation/Allocation, Completeness, Existence)
- IIRROE (Inquiry, Inspection, Reperformance, Recalculation, Observation, External Confirmation)
Not exactly the most elegant strings of letters, but they’ll do.
Cases I Debriefed Today
Autotech.