Tendra Tents: what to know for the OCS pre-seen

This is our own summary of the Tendra Tents pre-seen for the CIMA Operational Case Study (OCS), written to help you plan your revision. It is not CIMA material, and it is no substitute for the real thing. Download the official pre-seen from your AICPA-CIMA account and read it in full before you rely on anything here.

The company in brief

Tendra Tents makes tents. It is privately owned and was founded by three friends who still run it. Its brand is built on being eco-friendly, which matters for almost every decision you will be asked about: a cost saving that hurts the brand is rarely a clean saving.

It sells three ranges of tents. It sells online to customers across Europe, and through retailers in its home market. Everything is made at a single production site.

The pre-seen includes the company's recent financial results, a budget for the coming year and information about the local tax regime. Those three items are the core of the finance you will be working with.

Put those facts together and you already have the outline of the business:

• Founder-run and private. Decisions are made by a small group of owners who know each other well. There are no outside shareholders to answer to, but there is less access to outside finance and less formal governance than a listed company would have.
• An eco-friendly brand. Materials, waste, packaging, returns and claims about the product all have a reputational side as well as a cost side.
• Two routes to market. Online sales across Europe and sales through home-market retailers behave differently: different margins, different payment terms, different customer service needs and different risks.
• One production site. Simple to manage and control, but a single point of failure. Anything that stops the site stops the business.
• Seasonal demand. Tents are a seasonal product. Even before you open the pre-seen, expect questions about building stock ahead of the camping season and the cash that ties up.

Your role

You are a Finance Officer in the finance department. That shapes how you should write.

At OCS you are not the finance director and you are not advising the board. You work with managers across the business, many of whom are not accountants, and your job is to explain figures, processes and controls in plain terms they can act on. A production supervisor wants to know what a variance means for their team, not a lecture on standard costing.

Most tasks will ask you to write something in your role: an email, a briefing note, a short report. Write to the person named in the task, in the format the task asks for, and keep your language practical and clear.

The syllabus at this level is E1, P1 and F1. In Tendra Tents terms that means day-to-day finance: costing and variances, budgets, working capital, tax, financial statements, and how technology changes the finance function.

Key figures to know

Our summary deliberately holds very few numbers, because the figures belong to the official document. The facts we can give you are these:

• Three founders, who still run the business.
• Three tent ranges.
• One production site.
• The pre-seen was released on 18 September 2026. The November exam window starts on 4 November 2026, and the February 2027 sitting, which uses the same pre-seen, ends on 5 February 2027. Check your own booking with CIMA.

Everything else you need you will find in the pre-seen itself. Before you start timed practice, build a one-page sheet of the figures that matter, in your own words:

• Revenue for each tent range, and for online sales against retail sales, if the pre-seen splits them.
• Gross margin and operating profit, and how they have moved over the years shown.
• The budget for the coming year, and how it compares with the most recent actual results.
• Cash, receivables, payables and inventory, and anything that tells you how seasonal they are.
• The main features of the local tax regime, as the pre-seen describes them.

Work out a few simple ratios yourself (margins, growth, inventory and receivable days) so that you know what is normal for this business. In the exam, the unseen will give you new figures. Knowing the baseline is what lets you say whether a new number is good news or bad.

Themes and likely triggers

Nobody outside CIMA knows what the unseen will contain, and anyone who claims to is guessing. What the pre-seen does is open up themes. These are the ones our practice tasks for Tendra Tents are built around, because they follow from the facts above:

• Materials, suppliers and variances. A tent maker depends on its materials. A change of supplier, a price rise or a quality problem leads naturally to price and usage variances and the link between them.
• Pricing and special orders. A retailer asks for a custom version or a bigger discount. Is it worth taking? What does it do to the relationship with other retailers?
• Budgets. The pre-seen gives you a budget, so expect tasks on how it was built, whether a target is realistic, and what happens when a manager wants it changed.
• Investment decisions. A new machine or process: does it pay for itself, and what does it mean for the production team?
• Working capital and cash. Building stock before the season, retailer payment terms, and whether the business can fund its own growth.
• Tax. The pre-seen includes the tax regime, which makes tax computations and explaining a tax charge fair game.
• Financial reporting. Provisions, accounting estimates and how a transaction should be treated in the accounts.
• Technology and data. Automating finance processes, using AI, and what the online sales and returns data can tell managers.
• Risk and the single site. Disruption at the production site, insurance, and business continuity.
• Sustainability. Take-back or repair schemes, recycled materials, and claims made about the product that need to stand up.
• Governance and ownership. A founder-run business looking for outside investment raises questions about control and how decisions get made.

Use this list to check your coverage, not to prepare answers. A pre-prepared answer that ignores the trigger scores poorly, however good it is.

How to prepare

The pre-seen came out about seven weeks before the exam. Here is a sensible way to use that time.

Read the pre-seen twice, a few days apart. The first time, read for the story: who runs the business, what it sells, what is going well and what is not. The second time, read as the Finance Officer: what would land on your desk?

Build your figures sheet and a short people list. Who are the key people in the pre-seen, and what do they care about? People and leadership marks often depend on knowing who will be affected and who needs persuading.

Revise the E1, P1 and F1 topics through the company. Don't revise a variance in the abstract when you can revise it as a variance on tent fabric. Every technique you learn should end with "and for Tendra Tents, that means...".

Start timed practice early. Reading and revising feel productive, but the exam tests writing under time pressure. Practise writing a full answer to a task in the time allowed, then look at what you missed. Do this often, not just in the final week.

Practise the screen, not just the content. The exam is on a computer, with a workings area and a calculator. Being comfortable with the screen saves time on the day.

Sit at least one full mock in exam conditions. Three hours is a long time to concentrate. Find out how your timing and stamina hold up before the real thing.

Review every answer. For each task, ask: did I answer the verb, did I use the trigger, did I mention the company in every point, and did I say what it means? Then rewrite the weakest paragraph.

Practise for Tendra Tents

Our current OCS practice tasks are all set in Tendra Tents, with a new trigger in each one, as in the real exam. You write in your role as Finance Officer, on an exam-style screen, and get marked in about a minute on the four competencies, with your own answer rewritten to the next level up and the reason for each change.

You can try one task free, with no card needed. For more about the level, see our Operational Case Study page and our Tendra Tents case study page.