*** ACCA Paper PM March 2019 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

I was a bit unsure too, from memory I talked about it being a new theme park so the profit would help to cover initial investment costs to mean breaking even sooner, regular hotel users potentially being forced to use a competitor hotel that might not return and the impact on staff of not being able to work along with potential new visitors not being able to visit.

I had the same section c on transfer pricing but may have got the part about the external supplier wrong (from memory it was only 3 marks) in part b i did talk about autonomy and goal congruence and how managers will take decisions in their interests, do u still think i will gain marks talking about this despite my calculations being wrong?

@jahmesha said:
The same happened to me. I almost missed the 31 days however after seeing these comments it makes me feel a little bit better. Also did anyone put 0 for the security and the electricity as there would be no changes if the hotel and waterpark remained opened or closed?

hi yes……does that finding of zero too include some mark? As I ran out of time for commentary….

Hi Connor

My understanding is you will still get marks for correct comments on incorrect calculations under the ‘own number’ rule.

On section C i had the question on the hotel/theme park and water park but I couldnt not work out if the costs in the table which they gave us represented 1 month or 2 months. What did everyone choose? I ended up taking the opinion that it was 2 months.

Also on the last C question. I had the Best Co night hotel questions, what did people put for their performance reasons? I didnt do many calculations as i felt like i was running out of time and the calculations were only 5 marks. I think i went too general and put things like external and internal like the economy not being as good etc.

omg I had the same issue!!! I went for 1 month in the end!!!

I also had Best Co Night Hotel question – I only did 2 workings for financial performance measure (ROCE and Operating profit margin) and 2 on NFP measures such as Customer satisfaction gone down and one more???

I had the exact same section C question. I only attempted RI and ROI question, didn’t have time to attempt the optimum production plan question.

what were your ROI calculations on process 1 and 2
mine were 19.something and 25 % for process 2

I think i wasn’t able to completely give the strength and weaknessess of using RI for divisional performance but did give it a try

@mrfukamachi said:
I had the exact same section C question. I only attempted RI and ROI question, didn’t have time to attempt the optimum production plan question.

what were your ROI calculations on process 1 and 2
mine were 19.something and 25 % for process 2

I think i wasn’t able to completely give the strength and weaknessess of using RI for divisional performance but did give it a try

Yes, I had the same calculations – only Proposal 2 ROI was above target ROI, although it had smaller RI if comparing with the Proposal 1.
I wrote only two advantages and two weaknesses of RI, not sure it will be enough.

I’ve attempted first question as well and managed to calculate optimum plan, but couldn”t understand how to calculate minimum penalty.

Did you have one question about sales variances in B section? I was rather confused with it.

The questions were quite easy in general. Part C was very involved with one 15 mark question on incremental cash flows and a 20 question marks on PM (financial and non-Financial).
Had I seen the exam before I would have probably started from part C and worked my way backwards.

If sitting CBE I strongly recommend practicing their spreadsheet online, as it is quite basic.

Thanks a million to OpenTuition, I felt I had a great understanding of the topic in general. I just can’t thank you all enough for helping me study and enjoy ACCA.

There was also the question for gathering information for training staff,the source of information is external since it is for finding customer preference for a product and price sensitivity,my concern is that whether the training costs for interviewing them is either direct or indirect cost?

@simspetya said:
I had same question about ROI and RI with two proposals.
It was annoying how at the right hand site of the screen I had available a word pad instead of excel spreadsheet.
So I lost so much time to write calculations on Word.
I’m totally disappointed of the CBE format. I didn’t expect it would be that elementary.
They could give a spreadsheet next to every question for calculating instead of using calculators.

I completely agree with you!
I was really annoyed with wordpad instead of Excel!
Had to doublecheck all calculations.

Have you completed the first question?

Hi ceriset
… first question do you mean about the coal price and usage variations?
I did only the a part of it with the variations. I really don’t remember the figures but I checked the sum of all four variations gave me the total material variation, which is the difference between the total budget cost of coals-12000 and actual cost-15thousand and something can’t remember.

In ROI and RI question I still am trying to make sure that I hadn’t missed any tricks:
We first had to calculate ROI and RI without any proposal. I only used the amounts for profit and capital employed without any adjustments, right? There were no figures available for depresiation or anything else.
In the proposals I didn’t adjust the capital employed with the cash for buying the machine as they said that cash flows are not manager responsibility without even mentioning how much it issue , right?
But now when I’m writing about this I start thinking that they were talking only about the cash already available and that cash from any future deals are actually of the manager responsibility.
How did you deal with this?