ACCA PM — Performance Management Syllabus 2026
PM at a Glance
PM (formerly F5) builds on MA and develops your ability to apply management accounting techniques to plan, control, and evaluate business performance. It's a challenging analytical paper that demands both calculation ability and written interpretation skills.
Complete PM Syllabus 2026 — Section by Section
Section A — Strategic Planning & Control
- Environmental influences on planning: PEST, Porter's Five Forces, value chain.
- Performance hierarchy: mission, objectives, strategies, and tactics.
- Critical success factors (CSFs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
- Balanced Scorecard: financial, customer, internal process, learning & growth.
Section B — Specialist Costing Techniques
- Activity-Based Costing (ABC): cost pools, cost drivers, and overhead allocation.
- Target costing: reverse engineering from market price to allowable cost.
- Life cycle costing: cost patterns across the product lifecycle.
- Throughput accounting: theory of constraints, TA ratio, and drum-buffer-rope.
- Environmental management accounting: full cost and input-output analysis.
Section C — Decision-Making Techniques
- Relevant costing: sunk costs, opportunity costs, incremental cash flows.
- Break-even analysis, margin of safety, and multi-product CVP.
- Limiting factor analysis and linear programming (graphical and simplex).
- Pricing decisions: market, cost-plus, skimming, penetration, and price discrimination.
- Make-or-buy and outsourcing decisions; shutdown analysis.
- Risk and uncertainty: expected value, maximin, maximax, minimax regret.
Section D — Budgeting & Control
- Types of budgets: incremental, ZBB, rolling, activity-based, beyond budgeting.
- Standard costing: setting standards and the controllability principle.
- Advanced variances: planning and operational, mix and yield, sales quantity and mix.
- Reconciling budgeted to actual profit using variance analysis.
Section E — Performance Measurement & Control
- Performance management in non-profit and public sector organisations.
- Divisional performance: ROI, RI, EVA — pros and cons for each.
- Transfer pricing: full cost, market, marginal, and negotiated; international dimensions.
- Performance in the modern environment: lean, TQM, kaizen, benchmarking.
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Get the official ACCA PM syllabus guide or our concise study notes with practice questions.
PM — Frequently Asked Questions
Is ACCA PM hard?
PM has one of the lower pass rates (~44%) in ACCA. The challenge is applying concepts to scenarios and producing well-structured written answers alongside calculations. Practice with past papers is essential.
Do I need to know linear programming for PM?
Yes. Graphical linear programming and the simplex method (at a basic level) are examinable. Focus on identifying the feasible region, optimal production mix, and shadow prices.
How many questions are in the PM exam?
The PM exam has three sections: Section A (15 OTQs worth 2 marks each), Section B (three 10-mark scenario-based questions), and Section C (two 20-mark questions requiring detailed analysis and recommendations).