*** F5 March 2016 Exam was.. Instant Poll and comments ***

I got 91.25 too

Also am i the only one who did Section B Q1 a) as a Tabular form?? I still got the same answer as most of you 4 batches but i did it in a table?!

For anyone who completed the balanced scorecard question, what did people put as a goal for each perspective?

I put:

Customer – reduce the amount of inaccurate bills

Financial – Reduce their increasing costs which may help profit (not sure if specific enough)

Internal business – Improve customer service, which was bad (not completely sure if this could apply for Internal, or only Customer)

Innovation and learning – improve the training of staff and provide incentives fot improvement, as they weren’t happy and poorly trained.

What did others put?

Self studied for f5 for 3 months witb singapore lsbf and opentuition materials. First attempt and i found the paper relatively easy (except q2 depreciation/roi)

The calculation questions have tricks in every one of them. I found the theory questions especially challenging

Some of my answers i can recall :
– neither e or g should be outsourced
– antivirus and encryption
– mis and eis: only 2 options were correct, internal and external data for eis, making decisions for mis. Unstructured is wrong.
– q1, there are many approach (like algebraic but not applicable this time) to solve i think. The question didnt specify what to base the decision on. So i wrote: i assume the company wants to maximise profit (and not contribution) and create a tabular format. 4 batches.
Why not algebraic which uses P and q? Because variable cost is not constant prolly due to shipment cost or bulk discounts or internal eos savings by the seller. Why fixed cost increase? Because of storage cost

-q2 super tricky … i create tables and broke down the different parts and adjust the inflation rate and find the new operating profit. Then calculate roi. Disadvantages: roi encourage use of old asset. Roi is in the % and it can worsen goal congruence when used with ri. Elaborate how. Think might lose 5 marks here…. 🙁

-q3 life cycle costs. Include all the sunk costs. Contribution lost is a relevant cost but should not be included in the life cycle cost of the new product. The manager 20k salary is a committed cost and not relevant since he works permemnant there. Made slight losses in year 1 but made huge profits in year 2. Around 62.2m

-q4 totally giveaway. One of the past year paper (2013-2015) has this exact same question for 15m on balance scorecard. Just had to copy and past while applying. They used a tabular format to answer part b

– planning both adverse
Operational eff favourable about 43k
Operational rate slightly adverse about 3k but not entirely his fault because his account was not aware of the pay rise too

Manager done exceedingly well.

Special mentions for performance: No idle hours too. Produced 12600 That year which exceeds the 12000 demand

Thank you… My mind is at ease now.

I was seeing responses with overall fav. efficiency variances and fav op variances for both.

I knew I had a small adverse difference of 3,150 for labour rate and a huge fav op efficiency variance. I started to doubt myself.

@ahstpk said:
MCQ:
One was which is constraint as per limitation factor:
wood
labour
inspection ( I guess it was something else)
Output (correct Ans.)

Yes I agree

@sapphire16 said:
Slight Off-Topic, (but exam related), I wondered if anyone could answer my query.

Today was my first sitting of an ACCA exam, and I understand that on the front sheet of the answer booklet, you have to tick which questions you attempted in Section B (There were 5).

I attempted all 5 questions, but I forgot to tick them on the front sheet to say I attempted them.

My answer booklet has rough workings on the first few pages for MCQs (which I later crossed out), and I then started each Section B Question on a new page, and shaded in the relevant bubble at the top of the page.

It might be a silly question, but will there be any problems recording my marks/marking in general for Section B if I didn’t confirm my question attempts on the front sheet, with my answers not seen until a few pages in?

It won’t be an issue, they will mark all your answers in the paper.

MCQ’s were hard as they were based mainly on the theoretical side of the syllabus. However, I found the number ones okay.

Section B

Question 1-Llike everybody is saying it was to just calculate the profit by deducting the costs and it did state the equation could not be applied, so that gave me some confidence to continue this method, I got 4 batches to be the most profitable.

Question 2 – Lifecycle costing. I don’t quite recall what I did for the Patent cost for 10 years. I think I divided the figure by 10 and multiplied it by 2 also adding the renewal costs for each year. Lawyer’s fees was due to the product patent, so I did not deduct that either from the General Fixed costs. Advertising and Marketing was calculated by multiplying each figure with the probabilities and adding them together for both years.

Question 3 – My ROI was around 25%. I deducted dep’n from the expenses and used Net profit for my controllable profit because depreciation is not controllable by the manager. Part b was just explaining the reasons to why ROI is not a good divisional performance measure and reasons like it encourages sub optimal behaviour and managers are keen to keep ROI’s high whereas an investment in a project can be profitable for the business in the long term etc.

Question 4 – Balanced Scorecard. I was glad I practised a question like this on the Kaplan Exam kit and it went really well, the aim was to just read the scenario carefully and pick out any improvements the business could possibly make to improve their performance.

Question 5 – The labour rate variance was Adverse and Favourable for efficiency. After I pretty much messed up really, I don’t think I scored very well on the last question.
In part C, I added a few points like planning is not controllable and operational is and therefore the manager should be assessed fairly by only looking at the operational variance.

Balanced scorecards? Had no idea what this was. This might of cost me the exam.

So for the one where u had to say how many batches did anyone else break the profit down into units? As 2 and 3 gave the highest profit per unit then it declined quite a lot in 4 and further in 5….I then analysed if it was worth making the 3 due to the increase in FC. Please tell me someone else did this and I didn’t overthink it lol

@cagass said:
I found section B ok but they were the hardest mcqs I’ve seen. Did anyone work out the EV mcq question?

I got 9.25 for abc.

For question 1 I mentioned that taxes had an effect on the variable cost and the variable cost needs to be constant for algebraic method.

For relevant cost mcq I said £20k although I’m worried that I shouldn’t have put the variable olverhead in. They didn’t state whether they were labour related.

Feed forward control for mcq although it may have been wrong.

Got stuck on mcq for CVP as to which amount to supply.

G only for outsource question. Does anyone remember if they were specific or attributable fixed costs?

Tax should be propotionate to variable cost. Because it is average cost including tax

Outsource neither

Yes feed forward

I included the variable oh. It is assumed

For your labour rates those were for the operational or overall variance?

@christa316 said:
For your labour rates those were for the operational or overall variance?

Total adverse 3k

Planning
Both adverse

Operational
Rate 3k adverse
Efficiency 43k favourable

Thats what i could recall