My Road to CFA

I have almost finished my first time review of the material for Financial Statement Analysis. As a person with no accounting background, it was like a torture to study Financial Statement Analysis (Study Sessions 7 to 10).

CFA is not an exam at an introductory level. Also consider that Financial Statement Analysis is the most important topic in the Level I exam. My advice is, read for more than one times, because it is really difficult, especially for people like me.

Financial Statement Analysis in CFA Level I emphasizes on the use of financial statements for analytic purposes, So the process of bookkeeping or doing journal entries are not required. But I found that knowledge in bookkeeping will at least help you a bit on understanding the material, so again, my suggestion is to get at least a basic understanding of those things.

To know more about bookkeeping and, most importantly, the double-entry method, please see an introduction in Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-entry_bookkeeping_system

It would be of great help if you have  a better understanding of Debits and Credits, which are quite different from the usage from normal "everyday-life" sense.