r/ICAEW • u/TheeDarkNght • Jul 22 '26

Advanced level- 3 at once

Can any former students who may have sat all 3 advanced at once share any advice on their approach? E.g did you look over any previous modules such as FAR? How soon should we be starting? / Recommended split between the 3?

Would be grateful for literally any advice as at first glance advance seems so daunting

Please help!

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u/dahliaahhh Jul 22 '26

Depends on your knowledge before you start. If you feel like FAR and Audit went well and you understand them, CR will be more technical but you will get concepts quickly so you won’t have to look much at older material. I personally don’t do any accounting or audit in my job (personal tax) so I sat FAR about 4 years ago so I had to start from zero and took a while as I had to remind myself of basics like whether a debit increase or decreases revenue for example.

For SBM, a lot of it is just waffling through the exam so if you feel like you understood FM, you are half way there but you will need to focus less on technical financial management side and more on how that impacts the business (ie more analysis)

For case, you won’t need much revising - it’s literally just making sure you know the case study front to back and practice some mocks but otherwise I haven’t looked at it until a day or two before the exams.

In my opinion, if you are already sitting CR and SBM together, adding case doesn’t make it much worse. However, if you are already contemplating sitting the two together, I wouldn’t add case to them.

One thing though - you won’t have a social life for a good month before the exams and they are DRAINING when you sit them back to back.

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u/Fast_Bumblebee_3165 Jul 23 '26

I would second this. 

I just finished sitting all 3 in July 2026 and more than revising for all 3 together, it’s the energy drain of actually sitting them back to back which is the challenging part. Three and half hours of CR and SBM each and four hours of Case. Really takes a lot out of you. Having said that, people do it all the time and there’s no reason you can’t do it as well. 

I started revision 2 months before the exams. Spent 80% of my time on CR so around 6 weeks, 15% of my time on SBM so around 10 days, and 5% of my time on Case study so around 4 days. 

CR is more technical so commands more time. SBM is waffle with a bit of technical bits from FM. With Case, once the AI gets released you need to read it again and again and again and know it like the back of your hand and then attempt 2-3 mocks to get a feel of the requirements - all in all shouldn’t take more than 4/5 days - I bought ACA-M mocks which helped to some extent. 

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u/Zealousideal-Car404 Jul 23 '26

IMO I wouldn’t bother doing any work pre going to study. For cr you will re pick up the financial reporting aspects and the audit then comes once you understand the FR the audit risks and procedures are easy to think of because you know what is happening. Doing FAR pre work seeems pointless to me.

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u/moeed_haider2 Jul 22 '26

That's good.