I finally sat down and got started reviewing for BEC this weekend. So far, chapter 1 hits on a lot of topics that are familiar from studying for REG, like partnership formation and authority.

Flipping through and seeing what the other chapters cover, it looks like quite a mish-mash of topics. I’ve studied a lot of this material in college, but it looks like it covers several classes worth of topics.

1. Business structures. We touched on these in several of my undergraduate business classes. In my graduate Tax class, we also learned about this in more detail, since we had to learn how different structures are taxed differently.

2. Economic concepts. Now we’re back to macro- and micro-economics. I took those classes several years ago, but hopefully I’ll remember the basics. We’ve also touched on some of these concepts in finance classes.

3. Financial management. Looks like this will be similar to basic finance class subjects.

4. Information technology. I’ve heard from several students who took BEC that they were surprised by how much of the exam seemed to test knowledge that we learned in our Accounting Information Systems class. It looks like this section is around 25% of the exam, so I can see why it’s a big deal. I foresee this being the hardest section for me to deal with.

5. Planning and measurement. Looks like this will take us back to good old cost accounting. Luckily, I actually quite like cost accounting, but I know that many of my fellow students hated that class. In either case, the impression I get is that people find this material boring, but not particularly challenging.
A couple people get annoying by this class because cost accounting doesn’t have as many clear-cut rules as financial accounting does. Of course, remember the 7 deadly myths of accounting-myth number 1: “learning accounting is like learning the rules of a game.”