US Certified Management Accountant (IMA) · Part 1 · Financial Planning, Performance and Analytics
CMA P1 Technology and Analytics: practice questions with answers
6 free exam-style questions on Technology and Analytics for CMA P1 Part 1 · Financial Planning, Performance and Analytics. Try each one, then open the answer to read the explanation. Fincora has 66 original questions on this syllabus area.
Question 1
Kilbride Manufacturing replaces its separate sales, purchasing, inventory and general ledger applications with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Which benefit is most directly attributable to the ERP architecture?
- A Each department can keep its own customer and product master files, which lets departments define data in their own way.
- B All modules share a common database, so a transaction entered once updates sales, inventory and the general ledger at the same time.
- C Implementation usually requires little change to business processes, because the ERP adapts to the company's existing workflows.
- D The need for internal controls is largely removed, because each transaction is entered only once into the system.
Show the answer
Answer: B. An ERP system integrates business functions around one common database. A sales order, for example, flows through order entry, inventory, shipping, billing and the general ledger without being re-entered, giving real-time, consistent information across the organization. Typical drawbacks are cost, implementation time and the process change required.
Question 2
Before building a model to predict late customer payments, an analyst at Ferris Wholesale removes duplicate invoice records, fills in missing payment-term fields and converts all dates to one format. These steps are best described as:
- A data cleansing (scrubbing) as part of data preprocessing
- B data mining to discover hidden patterns in the data
- C data visualization to communicate the results
- D prescriptive analytics to recommend a course of action
Show the answer
Answer: A. Data preprocessing turns raw data into a form suitable for analysis. It typically includes data cleansing (removing duplicates and errors, handling missing values and outliers), data transformation (standardizing formats and units, normalizing values) and data reduction. Poor-quality inputs produce unreliable models ('garbage in, garbage out'), so cleansing comes before any modeling.
Question 3
Gladstone Media subscribes to a web-based expense management application under a software-as-a-service (SaaS) arrangement. The provider hosts and runs the application on its own infrastructure. Which of the following remains mainly Gladstone's responsibility?
- A Patching the operating systems of the servers on which the application runs
- B Maintaining physical security at the data centers that house the servers
- C Upgrading the application software to each new version as it is released
- D Granting and removing its own users' access and checking the expense data they enter
Show the answer
Answer: D. Cloud service models divide responsibilities differently:
| Model | Provider manages | Customer manages |
|---|---|---|
| IaaS | Facilities, hardware, network, virtualization | Operating systems, databases, applications, data, users |
| PaaS | All of the above plus operating systems and runtime | Its own applications, data, users |
| SaaS | Everything up to and including the application | Its users, access rights and data |
Even in SaaS, the customer must manage user provisioning and removal, review the data entered and configure the application's settings. To gain assurance over the provider's controls, Gladstone would obtain the provider's SOC 1 or SOC 2 report and operate the complementary user entity controls it lists.
Question 4
Ellery Coffee wants to show its board whether there is a relationship between monthly local advertising spend and monthly sales across its 45 stores. Which visualization is most appropriate?
- A A scatter plot with advertising spend on the horizontal axis and sales on the vertical axis
- B A pie chart showing each store's share of total advertising spend for the month
- C A stacked bar chart showing each store's sales split by product category
- D A line chart showing total company sales by month for the past three years
Show the answer
Answer: A. Choose the chart to fit the message. Relationship between two numeric variables: scatter plot (optionally with a trend line). Trend over time: line chart. Composition or share of a whole: pie or stacked bar. Comparison across categories: bar chart. To test whether advertising and sales move together across stores, a scatter plot is the clearest choice.
Question 5
In Halford Cabinetry's production (conversion) cycle, the storeroom must release lumber and hardware to the factory only for authorized jobs, and the cost of the materials released must be charged to the correct job. Which document should authorize the release of materials and provide the basis for charging the job?
- A Receiving report
- B Bill of materials
- C Purchase requisition
- D Materials requisition
Show the answer
Answer: D. Key documents in the production (conversion) cycle:
| Document | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Bill of materials | Lists the raw materials and quantities needed for one unit of a product |
| Operations list (routing) | Lists the sequence of operations and the machines and time needed |
| Production order | Authorizes production of a specified quantity |
| Materials requisition | Authorizes the storeroom to issue materials for a specific production order or job; the basis for charging their cost to it |
| Move ticket | Records the transfer of work between work centers |
| Job time ticket | Records labor time charged to a job |
Using the materials requisition keeps custody (storeroom) separate from authorization (production planning) and gives the audit trail needed to cost each job accurately. Issues without a requisition, or quantities above the bill of materials, should be investigated.
Question 6
Monitoring software at Fairhaven Credit Union shows that an intruder is still active on a server holding members' account data and is copying files to an outside address. Under a typical incident response plan, what should the response team do first?
- A Wipe and reinstall every server immediately so that any tools the intruder has installed are removed from the network
- B Issue a press release announcing the breach to members and the public before its scope and cause are known
- C Take no action until the forensic investigation is complete, so that none of the evidence on the server is disturbed
- D Contain the incident, for example by isolating the affected server from the network, while preserving logs and other evidence
Show the answer
Answer: D. A typical incident response plan (for example, one based on NIST guidance) moves through: preparation → detection and analysis → containment, eradication and recovery → post-incident review.
Once an active intrusion is confirmed, the priority is containment, such as isolating the server, blocking the outside address or disabling compromised accounts, to stop further data loss. Logs, memory and disk images should be preserved so that investigators can establish what was taken and how.
Eradication (removing the intruder's tools), recovery (restoring clean systems) and notification of regulators and affected members follow as the facts become clear, and a post-incident review identifies control improvements.
Keep practising Technology and Analytics
Sign up free to practise this syllabus area in full, sit timed CMA P1 mocks and see your score by area. Every question on Fincora is written by us; none are past exam papers.
More CMA P1 syllabus areas
Practice questions are for study only and are not official exam questions. Back to CMA P1 mock exams and practice.