Will the QBO Advanced exam be more "how to" or "how do"?
QuickBooks exams for the most part have been how to until the QuickBooks Advanced exam came along. What I mean is that the curriculum for ProAdvisor certifications taught you how to use certain features of QB. For example how to properly set up items or enter credit card transactions, or when to use assembly items vs group items. The exams pretty much followed suite asking questions like which item type would be best in this case.
The QuickBooks Advanced exam on the other hand is very accounting theory based and really more of a how do you deal with this scenario. It requires analytic skills and abilities that stumped a lot of people who take the exam. The advanced exam was highly controversial in the first year or so because people criticized the fact that Intuit would ask what was wrong in a question and yet the only correct answer was a small portion of the errors present.
Michelle Long who began teaching a course on Preparing for the Advanced Exam use to teach that you had to answer the questions the Intuit way as laid out in the prep materials. Even a journal entry entered in the wrong order could result in a missed question. An example she gave is how many ways can you get 4 from just 2 numbers? (1+3, 2+2, 1 x 4, 2 x 2, etc.). If Intuit shows you 1+3 you better answer that way if you want to pass.
The QBO certification has been a very simple how to exam based on the online product, where do you access this feature kind of thing. Lots of training both live and recorded has been conducted to prepare almost anyone to get certified. The Cloud ProAdvisor program which is free as contrasted with the regular QuickBooks ProAdvisor program has brought in tens of thousands of ProAdvisors many who are getting certified in QBO.
So the question is, "will the Advanced QBO exam be more how to or how do"? Will Intuit be looking for highly knowledgeable accounting professionals to certify based on actual accounting principles or is this just a new bigger badge to layer on ProAdvisors who specialize in QBO as opposed to those that simply use the software to access their cloud clients?
The fact that Michelle Long, who has been teaching the QBO Exam preparation courses, along with the fact that she has consistently taught the Advanced Exam preparation course (and wrote the current materials for it) is going to be teaching the preparation course for the Advanced QBO Exam to be offered at next month's QuickBooks Connect should tell you something about the exam.
At this point I will just say that "a little bird told me....." (well, I bet you can guess the answer). But if I were you I wouldn't look for it to be nearly as simple as the current QBO exam.
I still haven't found the answers out to questions I had when I first heard about the new training. Must you be QBO certified to take the QBO Advanced exam? Why is QBO advanced available so soon, QuickBooks Advanced requires 3 years of QuickBooks certifications before becoming eligible? Last year Intuit said QBO cert would be only one year and the exam had to be taken at the end of 12 months, will Advanced replace that, and how long will Advanced cert be good for?
I guess we will find out the answer to these questions sooner or later, although it is starting to appear that you must be QBO Certified to take the QBO Advanced exam, but perhaps not to take the preparation course.
Unfortunately the little bird 'flew the coupe' before I could catch wind of any more secrets but you can be certain if I hear any other chirps about these details, you will be soon to know.
Murph