Pass Your CPA Exams, and Still Have a Life.

The SFCPA daily study routine consists of 2 parts: 1) the main 2hr session, and then 2) “mini-sessions” on our app throughout the rest of your day. In the 2hr main session, you’re using your main review course materials such as Becker, Roger, Gleim, etc, BUT, you’ll be following the strategies from the Study Process Pro course. The 2hr main session should ideally happen in the morning very first thing. That locks it in for the day; you don’t have to think about and dread a 4hr session all day when you’re at work… it’s already done and in the history books.

Mini-sessions just means studying in small chunks on your phone using our app, all throughout your normal day. No matter how busy someone is, your screen time report shows that all those 2-3 min chunks of looking at your phone somehow adds up to 2-3 hours a day. So this mini-sessions idea is simply to take advantage of that time while you’re trying to pass these exams. You’ll get the best results from alternating between the 4 study tools at different times: reading the review notes, listening to the audio notes, taking quizzes, and the follow-along notes are extremely effective to use for 15-20 min last thing at night when you’re trying to fall asleep.

Yes, and how effective it’s proven to be might surprise you. Besides being a convenient way to fit in study time so you don’t need to find as much dedicated study time, studying in small chunks in addition to a main study session has been proven to be MUCH more effective at retaining information than longer study sessions alone.

In 2013, a team of cognitive psychologists published a review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluating ten common study techniques. Two were rated "high utility": practice testing (answering questions from memory) and distributed practice (spreading study across time rather than concentrating it). Highlighting, rereading, and summarizing were rated low utility. A 2021 meta-analysis covering 242 studies and more than 169,000 participants reached the same conclusion — distributed practice and practice testing came out on top.

Look at what that means for CPA study. The traditional approach: watch the lecture, read and highlight the chapter, attempt some questions if there's time left - spends most of its hours on the techniques rated least effective, and the least time on the two rated most effective. The SuperfastCPA routine inverts that. You learn each topic through its questions, and you re-review every topic daily rather than once at the beginning and once at the end.

One frequently cited experiment makes the retention difference concrete: students who practiced recalling material retained about 80% of it a week later, compared to 34% for students who just reread it.

[Dunlosky et al., 2013]

The core of it is four steps that repeat for every topic, whether it's an easy one or the hardest thing in FAR.

1. Understand it in test-day context. Instead of watching a lecture and reading the chapter first, you start with the MCQs for that topic. You learn how to diagnose what a question is actually asking, then reverse-engineer the solution until the logic and/or calculation makes sense, so that you're building the understanding directly in the format you'll see on test day. There's a specific process for doing this, and a different one for simulations. Most people get to where they think they understand a topic, and then they move onto the next topic without doing anything related to steps 2-4 below, but every step in this process is more important than the last.

2. Verify that you actually understand it. This is the step almost nobody does, and it's where most study time quietly goes to waste. Thinking or assuming you understand an explanation, and being able to produce the answer yourself are different things, and it's easy to mistake the first for the second. Study Process Pro shows you how to prove to yourself that you've actually got it before you move on.

3. Capture the understanding. Breakthroughs on difficult topics are surprisingly fragile and fleeting. You can fully understand something on a Tuesday and have it gone by the following week, because you've pushed a dozen new topics in behind it. So you “capture it”, in your own words, in a format built for recall rather than rereading. There are rules for which things get captured and which don't, because doing this for everything would consume your whole study process.

4. Re-review, constantly. Part of your study time each day is spent re-hitting or “re-reviewing” the previous topics you’ve been through. This obviously means your understanding & retention of all the topics dramatically improves as the weeks go by, instead of slowly forgetting all the stuff you previously studied. This re-review is part of your main session, then also throughout your day using the study tools, and through the material you've captured yourself. Each one hits the topics differently, which is part of why it works. It's also how you find out what still needs work: the things you keep missing become obvious, and there’s specific strategies in the course for turning those weak areas into strengths.

That's the loop. The topic changes, the process doesn't.

What the course actually teaches is the how for each step: the specific sequence for breaking down an MCQ, the different approach simulations require, what counts as verification, which types of information get captured and in what format, and how to set up each form of re-review in whichever review course you're using. Plus the strategies around the edges: how to handle a retake, how to use your final 48 hours before an exam, how scheduling your exams can either give you advantages or disadvantages on test day, etc.

It's also not just explained. The course includes walkthroughs where you watch each step performed on real questions and simulations, so you can see exactly what the process looks like in practice before you try it on your own material.

The four steps are the logic. The specifics are what make it work the same way every time, which is what turns studying from a daily guess into something repeatable.

You only need 2 hours of dedicated study time, which will be your main study session as described above. Then the mini-sessions just fit into the rest of your day, from your phone.

However, common sense applies of course: If you’re getting close to your test date and you feel like you need to put in more time on specific topics, or maybe you want to add in an extra hour at night because you feel like you need it leading up to an exam, these are your exams afterall, so you can tailor the daily routine as needed at certain times. But in general, yes: once you learn our strategies and study approach, in 2 hours a day you’ll be able to move through topics faster WHILE learning & retaining them better, than someone studying 4-5 hours a day using the traditional study approach.

Our approach is easy to get started with regardless of where you’re currently at in your main review course. It will be easy to understand once you watch the Study Process Pro videos, but the short answer is, wherever you’re at in your material, you can simply switch to the SFCPA strategies for your main study sessions, add in the re-review methods wherever you’re at currently, and start using our study tools throughout your day.

Yes. The Study Process Pro course teaches you our study framework and the strategies for each part of the study process, but you’re going to apply those strategies to your main review course to move through the lessons much faster, learn them more effectively in “test day context,” etc.

We aren’t a full review course, and we’re not trying to be. We fill the two main gaps you’ll encounter when you’re using a review course by itself: 1) You’re given a literal library of information to learn, but it doesn’t come with a set of strategic instructions on how to effectively do that. So that’s exactly what our Study Process Pro course teaches you how to do. 2) The idea of studying from your phone in small chunks is so valuable because you’re able to do it as you go through your normal day without needing to find extra dedicated study time (and, this “spaced repetition” is proven to more effectively cement the information in your memory compared to long study periods alone). But the problem with the app your review course provides, is that it’s all “full strength” CPA questions, which aren’t really feasible or practical to do from your phone, unless you want to have to pull out a calculator and scratch paper. That is what the SuperfastCPA study tools provide: each of our study tools presents the information and/or questions in a simplified format, so that it’s easy to understand and work with on the app, even in chunks as small as 1-2 minutes, while still allowing you to effectively learn and practice the topics and questions.

So ultimately it’s up to you, but a lot of our customers decide to purchase the program early, so that they can take their time watching the Study Process Pro videos and really get clear on all the strategies, and have a plan completely ready to go when they are ready to fully start the study process. Also, you’re able to start using the study tools on the app, which gives you a huge head start on the material and topics.

The short answer is 90 min of new topics/new material, and then the last 30 minutes is dedicated to a re-review set of MCQs you generate from all the previous topics you’ve already been through. There are specifics about this re-review set that are all explained in Study Process Pro, but doing this daily set gives you a ton of benefits: 1) You’re replicating and practicing exactly what you’ll be doing on test day, which 2) improves your question-answering “skills”, 3) it helps you get “good at” and fast at answering MCQs effectively, 4) it helps you continuously improve your retention & understanding of all the previous topics you’ve been through - instead of forgetting them, and 5) it’s helping your practice and improve your “active recall” of the topics, which is really all you have on test day, and which isn’t emphasized or practiced in the traditional CPA study approach.

The main session doesn’t have to be in the morning. The #1 rule is consistency: really aiming to never miss a day, which is much easier when you only need to study for 2hrs vs 4-5hrs. But, for most people, nailing the 2hr main session reliably is easier to do first thing in the morning. Nothing can come up in the evening and ruin it, it’s easier to focus and be productive & effective when your brain is fresh in the morning, there are less distractions at 6am than at 7pm when everyone in your house is eating dinner and coming & going, etc. But if you can reliably make the 2hr session happen at night, or do 1 hour in the morning and the second hour at lunch or in the evening… the overall goal is daily consistency, however that works best for you.

We’ve heard that a thousand times, but we also have many “converts” that were willing to commit to the morning main session and realized 1) how much easier it was to focus and be effective first thing in the morning vs when your brain is fried from working all day, 2) how mentally freeing it is to have your main session locked in and done so that you don’t have to think about it all day, and 3) that the only single downside is… waking up earlier. Everything else about it just works better and produces better results for most people to do it first thing in the morning.

There’s a few things you can do. 1) You can try splitting up the main session by doing 1 hour in the morning, then the second hour either at lunch or in the evening. 2) You can add motivation to getting up in the mornings and making the study session a “ritual”. Buy yourself your favorite caffeine drinks, or any type of drink for that matter, your favorite snacks, breakfast foods, etc - and then only let yourself have them if you’re up and sitting down studying. As mentioned above, we’ve converted many “I’m not a morning person” people with the combination of making your morning studying a ritual + the fact that everything seems to start working better.

The first thing I would say is, really, really commit to and hold yourself to making the 2hr session happen essentially no matter what. It’s only 2 hours, and if a day goes off the rails in the morning, you can dig deep and do it at night, or split the two hours at some point in your day. But, if you do miss a day, this format is much more forgiving than if you’re trying to study 4-5hrs a day, which means you’d be looking at 8-10 hours the next day just to catch up. So if you do miss a day, you just pick up where you left off, and then over the weekend you put in some extra time so that you “never start a Monday behind” on your study plan. The multiple forms of re-review you’ll be doing as part of our process keeps your retention of previous topics in check, and missing one day once in a while isn’t catastrophic, then use the weekend to catch up on your study plan.

On the weekends it’s the same base 2 hour main session, but then you can add extra time as needed. You also use the weekend as a “buffer”. A key idea from our process is “Never Start a Monday Behind.” Meaning, if there were a couple topics that you found difficult from earlier in the week, then it makes sense to put in extra hour or two directly hitting them again and get to where you feel good about them. Or, if you did miss a day earlier in the week, you use the weekend to catch up on your study plan. So “never start a Monday behind” means either 1) behind on your study plan, or 2) having topics from earlier in the week that you still don’t feel good about.

Again, where the base session is only 2 hours, it should be possible one way or another to get those 2 hours in. We have had users that strictly take off a certain day a week for religious reasons, and that’s all personal preference, you might just need to make other adjustments to stay on track with your study plan.

We have a lot of users in that situation, and the answer is simple: You just follow the same base 2hr session as described in the Study Process Pro course, but you just do 3-4 of those 2hr sessions, meaning 6-8hrs total. Then there’s still plenty of time to do mini-sessions in the other parts of your day. By the way, mini-sessions aren’t just a way of getting in extra time when you’re busy: studying and reviewing in small chunks in addition to your main session is proven to be much more effective than only doing one long study session each day. See the FAQ above under “Is studying from my phone in 3-5min chunks actually effective?”

It’s true that one of the main pillars of the SFCPA approach is primarily using MCQs as your main learning tool, since understanding each topic in “question format” is what you’re actually tested on. And there’s a process to each part of doing it correctly and effectively, which is what the Study Process Pro course teaches you. However, when you first start using our study approach for the first couple of weeks, for some people it can be helpful to use a blend of going through the MCQs first for a new topic, and then watching some or all of the video lecture. Going through the questions first gives you a lot of context about what the questions are asking, and therefore, what you’re trying to learn from the video. That alone makes the video lecture make a lot more sense the first time, and it helps you start connecting the dots between how the questions work and how the lecture or text presents the same information. But once you start getting the hang of our MCQ “reverse-engineering” process, you’ll need the video & textbook less and less, and eventually not really at all, which of course dramatically speeds up how fast you get through topics. All that being said, once in awhile there might be a topic or part of a topic that’s just not clicking from the questions alone, and so you might refer to that specific part of the video lecture.

Admittedly, it probably will feel like that at first. But again I would remind you to think about how many times you’ve invested 2-3hrs watching a video lecture and then reading the textbook chapter for a topic, only to still be confused by the practice questions anyways. So like any new skill that you’re trying to learn, there will be a period of struggle and confusion as you’re learning this process, and that’s completely normal, and as long as you execute the strategy and process from the Study Process Pro course, it will start to click within a week or two.

We obviously can’t say something like “6 days” that will be true for everyone, but in general, if you’re following the process and putting in the time each day, it starts to click for most people within a week or two. For some people it clicks within a day or two, and for others it could be more like 2-3 weeks. But, we have numerous walkthroughs in the Study Process Pro course, and our MCQ walkthrough videos provide hundreds of actual examples that simultaneously teach you 1) each topic directly in MCQ format, and 2) the process we’re talking about of breaking down and making sense of MCQs.

There are videos in Study Process Pro on simulation strategy and how to most effectively use the practice sims in your review course, but there’s really 3 main things to keep in mind about the simulations: 1) Yes, you want to do enough practice SIMs to where you understand the format of each type and get familiar with how they work, BUT 2) because they are dynamic, there will always be surprises on test day you can’t fully prepare for with practice sims. Therefore, practice sims are useful if you use them “correctly” (which is described in Study Process Pro), but they are only useful up to a point: Endlessly doing practice sims in your review course won’t prepare you for everything you could possibly see on the real sims on test day. 3) The #1 key to success with the sims on test day, is to finish the MCQs as quickly as possible, so that you have time to sit there and first figure out what each sim is wanting you to do. That’s the biggest issue with the real sims on test day: many of them will look very confusing when you first look at them, and it just takes a minute to open the different exhibits and start piecing things together. And you can’t do that if you’re rushed for time because you took too long on the MCQs. So our study approach directly prepares you to do that. You will naturally be “fast” at MCQs when you’re following our daily process. Compare that to someone who has only studied the traditional way, and hasn’t consistently practiced answering a certain number of questions in a certain amount of time. When they get to test day, they are forced to answer questions much faster than they are used to, which obviously leads to making a lot of mistakes or even having to literally just start guessing because they’re running out of time.

The key to our study tools is just USAGE. Use them as much as you can, as often as you can. One thing we tell our users is that any single “mini-session” could give you the one extra nugget of understanding that could make the difference on test day. The app tracks your usage and is setup to help you hit “perfect days” with our study tools, which means taking at least 10 quizzes, 20 min of reading the review notes, 30 minutes of the audios, and 15 min of the follow along notes. Of course, this is all explained in more detail in the Study Process Pro videos.

This is a very important question, and we have a great answer. First of all, for most people that are just using a review course, all they have is their review course dashboard that gives their metric of your “readiness”, which is really just based on how much of the material you’ve consumed. The review course software obviously can’t read into your mind and get an accurate number of how well you actually understand each topic. But what is extremely reliable and predictive, is the trend of your daily scores on the 30-min re-review set. Again, the details of how to set these up and do them correctly are explained in Study Process Pro, but you’re doing these daily sets of MCQs, pulled randomly from the topics you’ve already studied, and so what you are scoring on these daily sets is the most reliable indicator of how you’re doing across the topics you’ve studied so far. And a key tip along with that, since you’re doing these sets daily on topics you’ve previously studied, sometimes you will see questions that you’ve seen before. And, you might remember that the answer is “B”, but if you don’t actually know why, or couldn’t calculate the answer correctly yourself, then you should choose a wrong answer intentionally, so that your score for that daily set is accurate. There is obviously no real benefit to you on test day from “gaming” your daily re-review scores.

So the daily re-review set is not just about seeing what you score. As mentioned above, it is also helping you improve on all the skills that matter on test day, and carefully reviewing any questions you miss on each daily set helps you identify and fix weak areas, instead of finding that out on test day. So the first few weeks, your scores on the daily re-review set isn’t hugely important, as long as you’re following the process outlined in Study Process Pro, because that means you’ll be identifying and turning weak areas/topics into strengths, etc. But, as you get a few weeks away from your exam date, the daily scores become meaningful and let you know where you’re really at, which allows you to adjust as needed, instead of going into your final review with no clue where you really stand, which means you can’t make the right adjustments, etc.

This is another thing we obviously can’t just state “4 weeks and you’ll pass”. The reality is, even with the best study strategies at your disposal, some people are able to study for a section and pass it within 3-4 weeks from start to finish, and others it might take a 6-7 week study timeline. A really good way to do it is, you think of the first 2-3 weeks as your “training period” because you’re trying to learn our study system and strategies. You’ll still be studying and moving through material as you’re doing this, but after the 2-3 weeks, you can evaluate how far you’ve gotten in your review course lessons, and then extrapolate and plan your test day based on that. At the same time, many people find and purchase our program when they’re halfway through studying for a section and they already have a test date, and in that case you just start following and applying the strategies, using our study tools, and in many cases you get the huge boost from our methods and tools and pass, but even if not, then you’re able to start from the beginning with our process for your next attempt and really nail it at that point.

So we get this question all the time in many forms: “I’ve been out of school for 10 years or 20 years… can I still do this?” Or, “I work full-time and have 3 kids at home, will this work for me?” Or, “I’m still in my master’s program but I have some extra time to start my CPA study…” So the answer is, regardless of your life situation or your background, our study process is the same, and it is the best/most effective way to study for and pass the CPA exams in the shortest amount of time possible.

It's how most people find us, but it isn't who it's for.

That's mostly a quirk of how people search. If your first section goes well, you're probably not googling CPA study strategies — you're just carrying on. It usually takes something going wrong to send someone looking for a different approach, so a lot of our members arrive after a failed attempt or a few months of grinding with nothing to show for it.

But that describes how people arrive, not who the process works for.

Plenty of candidates find us before they ever sit for an exam, and they're in the best position of anyone. They skip the part where you spend months building study habits that don't work for these exams, then have to unlearn them. There's nothing to undo. They start with a process and follow it.

The difference between the two is really just timing. Someone retaking is fixing an approach they've already spent months and an exam fee on. Someone starting out is choosing one before they've spent anything.

Either way the process is the same, and so is the reason to use it: what you do in your daily study sessions is what determines your score on test day, and that's true whether it's your first attempt or your fourth.

By skipping the part where you study for 2 months, fail an exam, and then have no idea what you did wrong or what to do differently going forward.

Almost everyone who ends up here got the same start: they bought a review course, opened lesson one, and did what seemed obvious: watch the lecture, read the chapter, attempt the questions. Nobody tells you that's the plan. It's just the order the material is laid out in, so that's what people do.

Then somewhere around week three it starts to come apart. Lessons take twice as long as they should. You can follow the lecture and still not answer the questions. Topics from two weeks ago are already fuzzy. And because nobody handed you a method, there's nothing to adjust, so the only available response is to spend MORE time studying, which is how a three-month plan turns into a year.

You're at the one point where none of that has happened yet.

Starting with a proven process to follow means your study sessions are productive from week one instead of week twelve. It means you're building the skills the exam actually tests: reading an unfamiliar question and working out what it's asking, from your very first topic, rather than finding out on test day that you don’t actually understand a lot of the topics. And it means the material you cover early is still with you at the end, because re-review is part of the routine from the start, rather than being forced to try and “relearn everything” in a 1-2 week final review.

There's also nothing to unlearn. People who come to us after a failed section have to break habits they've spent months reinforcing, and that's genuinely harder than starting fresh. You don't have that problem.

The exams are difficult either way. But there's a big difference between difficult-but-it’s-working and difficult-and-I-have-no-idea-if-it’s-working, and you get to pick which one you spend the next several months doing.

Yes. The process is exactly the same regardless of the section you’re studying for. Obviously, exams like AUD and ISC are much more conceptual while exams like FAR or BAR are very heavy on calculations. But, how to learn and understand each type is covered in the Study Process Pro course.

Yes you can. While that’s not ideal, the situation does arise where maybe you took FAR, then start studying for your next exam, and a few weeks later you find out you got a 73 on FAR. So you were so close that it makes sense to quickly do a retake while the material is still somewhat fresh in your memory, and so you end up basically studying for two sections for a few weeks. How you would implement it depends on the specifics of your situation and test dates, etc, but that’s the exact type of thing you can post in our members forum and get some answers and guidance on.

We have many international users where English is their second or third language. I think the bottom line is, our entire approach is based on you continuously learning and practicing the skills - in relation to the material & topics - that lead to success on test day, and so regardless of your background, our approach is the shortest, most effective path to passing your CPA exams.

We realize that, so it’s important to point out WHY all of that is possible.

The magic of our process is that it requires the discipline to nail the routine daily, while only spending study time on the things that directly contribute to test day, instead of half or more of your study hours being very ineffective/wasted.

The catch is that it requires real discipline, and most people won't really do it. Two hours every day, without exception. Mini sessions through the day when you'd rather scroll through social media. Cumulative re-review every single day, actively working through solutions and getting clear on why you missed what you missed, and then verifying you really get it. So it is less study time than having to watch every video lecture and read every chapter, but it does require “active” studying the entire time. You don’t get to just press play on a video and then sit back and tell yourself you’re “studying”. You are always actively working through solutions, re-performing, verifying you really get it, and so on.

That's a genuine trade, and it's the reason this isn't too good to be true. Nothing here is a shortcut. What it is, is a better use of hours you were going to spend anyway.

Once you accept that, our claims make sense instead of sounding too good to be true.

Less time isn't magic: it's what happens when you stop spending two or three hours per topic on watching and reading. Those hours are the bulk of a traditional study session, and they're the least effective part of it. Take them out and the day gets shorter on its own.

Better results follows for the same reason. You spend your study time on the thing the exam actually measures, and you hit every topic repeatedly instead of just twice. Neither of those is a clever trick; they're just what the routine does daily.

Easier is the one people are most skeptical of, and it's the most straightforward. Your session is done before work instead of you having to think about and dread it all day. Two hours is much easier to deal with than 4-5 hours. Keeping your nights to yourself means you have time to relax and recharge, which makes the entire process much more sustainable.

So: it's a real trade, not a magic trick. You bring consistency and a willingness to implement “active” study methods, directly on the things that matter, and in exchange, no more study hours are wasted.

That's also why the guarantee is structured the way it is: watch the Study Process Pro videos, implement the process for 30 days, and if it isn't working as we've described, you get your money back. We're not asking you to believe any of this on faith. You can test it yourself.

Beyond the hundreds of success stories on our site and the 200+ customer interviews on our podcast: yes, there's a substantial body of research behind why it works.

In 2013, a team of cognitive psychologists published a review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest evaluating ten common study techniques. Two were rated "high utility": practice testing (answering questions from memory) and distributed practice (spreading study across time rather than concentrating it). Highlighting, rereading, and summarizing were rated low utility. A 2021 meta-analysis covering 242 studies and more than 169,000 participants reached the same conclusion: distributed practice and practice testing came out on top.

Look at what that means for CPA study. The traditional approach (watch the lecture, read and highlight the chapter, attempt some questions if there's time left) spends most of its hours on the techniques rated least effective, and the least time on the two rated most effective. The SuperfastCPA routine inverts that. You learn each topic through its questions, and you re-review every topic daily rather than once at the beginning and once at the end.

One frequently cited experiment makes the retention difference concrete: students who practiced recalling material retained substantially more of it a week later than students who simply reread it.

To be clear about what this does and doesn't mean: none of these studies were run on CPA candidates. What they establish is that the underlying principles, retrieving information rather than reviewing it and spreading that retrieval across time, are among the most reliably supported findings in learning research. Our strategies are a specific way of applying those principles to the CPA exams.

Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving students' learning with effective learning techniques: Promising directions from cognitive and educational psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.

Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-enhanced learning: Taking memory tests improves long-term retention. Psychological Science, 17(3), 249–255.