Question: What concepts are covered in Part 3?
Answer: This section of the CIA exam covers business analysis and information technology. Part 3 of the CIA exam consists of 5 subsections. Candidates must demonstrate proficiency and awareness for three of these sections; for the other two sections, candidates need only demonstrate awareness.
Subsection 1 covers business processes. Candidates must understand quality management, The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) framework, forecasting, project management techniques, business process analysis, inventory management, marketing, and human resources. This subsection requires both proficiency and awareness.
The second subsection covers the topics of financial accounting and finance. Candidates must show proficiency and awareness of basic, intermediate, and advanced financial accounting; cost of capital; debt; equity; financial instruments; cash management; valuation models; and business development life cycles.
In the third subsection, managerial accounting is discussed. The topics covered are cost concepts, capital budgeting, operating budget, transfer pricing, cost-volume-profit analysis, relevant cost, costing systems, and responsibility accounting. This is the last subsection in which both proficiency and awareness must be demonstrated.
Subsection 4 covers regulatory, legal, and economics. This section requires candidates to demonstrate awareness, but not proficiency of topics such as, impact of legislation on business, taxation, contracts, and key economic indicators.
The final subsection only requires awareness of information technology topics. Covered topics include control frameworks, data communications, electronic funds transfer, e-Commerce, electronic data interchange, IT operations, encryption, information protection, enterprise-wide resource planning software, operating systems, application development, voice communications, contingency planning, systems security, databases, software licensing, and web infrastructure.