Business tax AQ2016 - Reference material

DanielEvansSouthall

Hi everyone,

Just wondering how much people refer to the reference material in the AQ2016 business tax exam. I have studied this subject on the basis that I won't use the reference material and so am only looking at it now, two weeks before my exam. It seems that it covers everything, bit strange for AAT to provide so much technical information in the exam itself? especially even providing some pro formas for key calculations...

Emmajane1983

Hi,

I have my business tax exam next week AQ2016 and i was revising in the same way and I have just realised the reference material on the mock exam too. Surely this inst included on the exam as it helps. Did you find this was there on your exam?

I failed this exam on AQ2013, i found it quite hard but revising this for this version seems a little easier but i will see next week.

CornishPixie

The business tax unit is quite a tough unit with lots to remember. You will be happy to hear that the reference material is provided in the exam. It is your friend ... use it well to ensure you work with the correct figures. The exam will fly by so make sure you know what is in each section of the reference material so you will know where to look to check something. And, yes, there are even proformas for some things, but it doesn't tell you how to use them! Good Luck to you both. I really enjoyed it!

ArnoldGrove

With regard to any future studiers wondering about this still, yes all that reference material really is available in the exam, pages and pages of the stuff!

I think you have two options really. Either

1) Study as if it were not, as this will save you time looking things up in the exam. When you come to review your answers you can double check them in the reference material.
or
2) Practice nearly every question referring to the reference material as much as possible and build up speed at using the material provided instead, as you will find that nearly every answer and nearly every calculation you need is in provided the ref material.

In all honesty this unit felt like a bad joke with the amount of content in the reference material, and at times I did wonder what was the point in even studying the unit once I saw how much info was available during the exam - not at all like PTAX where you do need to remember a lot more information (arguably too much). Business tax is almost handed to you on a silver platter in that regard, and feels very 'bitty' in comparison to personal tax, which is a much more cohesive unit.

amurray

DanielEvansSouthall said:

Hi everyone,

Just wondering how much people refer to the reference material in the AQ2016 business tax exam. I have studied this subject on the basis that I won't use the reference material and so am only looking at it now, two weeks before my exam. It seems that it covers everything, bit strange for AAT to provide so much technical information in the exam itself? especially even providing some pro formas for key calculations...

Hi Daniel,
I did this exam Friday just gone and found the reference material really helpful!

I have already sat and passed PTAX and I never made use of the reference material, I'm not really sure why as I knew it was there! However for BTAX I made sure that I familiarised myself with the layout of the reference material within the AAT mocks.

If you haven't already done the AAT Mocks I can certainly recommend them, they are exactly like the real exam and give you great experience of using the reference material.

Good luck for your exam!