ACL certification evaluates and recognises your ability to integrate ACL technology into your financial analysis and business process. Earning the ACL Certified Data Analyst (ACDA) designation enhances your professional development while validating your technical skills and ensuring you meet performance standards necessary to address key business challenges.
To attain certification, you must attain a minimum passing grade.
This closed-book, day-long certification exam is divided into two components: a Knowledge Inventory and a comprehensive Case Study. It is based on the most current version of ACL.
The ACL Certification is based on the ACL 100–level and the ACL 200–level courses. Although not required for certification, ACL recommends that you complete one course at each level prior to attending the exam.
The Knowledge Inventory component of the exam is three hours in duration and counts for 40 percent of the final grade. It is meant to test your familiarity with ACL concepts, terms, commands, and best practices.
The exam consists of multiple choice, true/false, fillin-the-blank, and short-answer questions covering six topics:
ACL Environment
Working in ACL and setting program options.
Planning
Planning your work to achieve your data analysis objectives with ACL.
Data Access
Accessing data using ACL, including data access methods, common file types, and data types.
Data Verification
Verifying data integrity using ACL functionality.
Data Analysis
Producing specified results using ACL commands, either on their own or combined with other commands or expressions.
Reporting
Outputting data to create ACL printed reports and graphs.
The Case Study component of the exam is three hours in duration and counts for 60 percent of the final grade. You are provided with a PC that is pre-loaded with data files, a data analysis scenario, and questions to answer. Scoring is based on your answers and your planning process.
The questions are organised into three sections:
Data Access & Integrity Verification
Using ACL to access data and to ensure it is complete, reliable, and ready to analyse.
Exploratory Analysis
Gaining a better understanding of the data by executing multiple commands.
Audit Analysis
Performing the analysis to achieve your audit objectives.
You should know how to:
- Work with the ACL interface, including the Project Navigator, Results tab, and Log
- Create an ACL project
- Create table layouts to access Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, flat fixed-length files, and report (print-image) files
- Import, copy, and edit table layouts
- Use ACL field definitions and data types
- Combine multiple tables
- Detect data corruption and invalid dates
- Generate control totals
- Detect blanks in key fields
- Test bounds of data in numeric and date fields
- Test numbered transactions (such as paychecks) for completeness
- Test records for uniqueness
- Test field relationships. For example, is the date of birth of an employee always earlier than the employee's hire date?
- Test reliability of a data field calculated from values in two other fields. For example, does "Net Pay" always equal "Gross Pay" less "Total Deductions"?
- Use the following commands: Verify, Count, Total, Statistics, Sequence, Gaps, Duplicates, Stratify, Classify, Age, Summarize, Cross-Tabulate, Extract, Export, Join and Relations
- Create computed fields (conditional and unconditional)
- Use global filters and command filters
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