DipIFR Study Plan: A Week-by-Week Revision Timetable

Who this plan is for

DipIFR is not a foundational student paper. ACCA designed it as a conversion course for qualified accountants and experienced professionals: you can register with a relevant country-specific professional qualification, with a relevant degree plus two years’ accounting experience, or with three years of full-time relevant experience. If you already hold a national-GAAP qualification or ACCA papers up to Financial Accounting, this plan assumes you are converting existing double-entry knowledge to IFRS rather than learning accounting from scratch — which is exactly why the timetable is shorter than a typical Applied Skills study plan.

What you are planning for

DipIFR is a single 3-hour-15-minute computer-based exam with four compulsory questions, each worth 25 marks, for 100 marks total and a 50% pass mark. Unlike FR and SBR, there is no objective-test section at all — every mark is awarded by an expert marker on a constructed response. Question 1 is almost always a consolidated financial statement, typically with adjustments to the parent’s own figures to work through first. Question 2 is scenario-based, sometimes asking you to critique a proposed accounting treatment, and always carries a 5-mark ethics component. Question 3 usually focuses on one specific IFRS Standard in depth. Question 4 is a set of independent, often non-numerical queries from a colleague — more like a series of short memos than a single calculation. For how to approach each question type on the day, see our DipIFR exam technique guide.

How to split your study time

• Weeks 1–6 (learning phase): roughly 50% learning each standard against your existing GAAP knowledge, 40% practising discrete questions styled on Question 3/4 (explain-and-apply, not just calculate), 10% reviewing errors.
• Week 7 (consolidation and ethics focus): dedicated time on the Question 1 topic area — full consolidated statement preparation with pre-consolidation adjustments — plus deliberate practice applying the Code of Ethics to a scenario rather than reciting it.
• Week 8 (exam phase): a full timed mock on the CBE platform, plus targeted repair of whatever the mock exposes.

Practise inside the real spreadsheet and word-processor response tools early, not just in the final week. The CBE spreadsheet has genuine mechanical traps — the drag-handle fill tool does not auto-extend a numeric sequence, and Undo after a Reset restores a word-processor answer but not a spreadsheet one — and getting comfortable with the mechanics is a separate skill from knowing the accounting. See our exam technique guide for the full list of CBE mechanics worth rehearsing.

The 8-week plan

Each week pairs a syllabus area with our free study guides. The sequence starts with the framework and ethics that run through every question, builds up the individual standards tested in Questions 2–4, and ends with the consolidation and group-accounting material that Question 1 is built on almost every sitting.

The compressed 4-week plan

If your existing qualification already covers IFRS-adjacent ground closely (for example, a GAAP that has converged substantially with IFRS, or recent ACCA Applied Skills papers), you can compress this into four weeks by treating each topic as a refresh rather than new learning — but do not compress the mock exam out of the plan.

What actually moves your mark in the final week

• Sit at least one full mock under real timed conditions. 195 minutes across 100 marks is just under two minutes per mark — roughly 49 minutes per question. Examiner’s reports repeatedly note that Question 4 is disproportionately left incomplete because of time lost earlier in the exam, so practise holding each question to its budget.
• Cross-reference every spreadsheet working to the cell it supports. An unformulated, unreferenced number makes it very hard for a marker to award partial credit even when the underlying calculation was partly right — the single most repeated technique point across the December 2024, June 2025 and December 2025 examiner’s reports.
• Answer the specific question asked, especially in Questions 3 and 4. These are often broken into several discrete sub-queries, and a generic recitation of a standard’s requirements — rather than applying it to what was actually asked — is the examining team’s most consistently cited cause of lost marks.
• Practise the ethics component as application, not recall. Question 2’s 5-mark ethics element rewards identifying the specific threat in the scenario and the specific safeguard that addresses it. A generic description of the Code of Ethics scores close to zero, and a significant number of candidates skip this part entirely.
• Type narrative into the word processor, not the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is for cross-referenced calculations; explanatory answers typed into spreadsheet cells are hard to mark.

Using our free guides alongside this plan

Each linked guide above is a free, plain-English summary of the standard with a worked example and practice questions. Browse every guide on the study guides index, and see the full picture of which standards DipIFR draws on in our DipIFR standards guide. If you are converting from an ACCA background rather than a different national qualification, the consolidation techniques here overlap closely with FR and SBR, though DipIFR’s single sitting compresses everything into one 100-mark paper rather than testing it across a multi-paper progression.