CPE Catalog & Events

This program addresses the many complex financial and tax accounting issues that are common in S corporation transactions, with discussion of common pitfalls and the new AICPA "small" GAAP accounting standards.

How do you raise your skills to the next level to master the Controller or CFO role?  Welcome to a course that provides insights that align the CGMA Competency Framework. The course will examine each of the areas: Technical, Business, Leadership and People to increase your competency.  How are your technical skills?  Are you a traditional accountant or have you learned to expand your technical skills to go beyond “what are the financial numbers?” to “why did these financial results occur?”  Are you able to use ratios to understand the business dynamics and the implications to change course or take corrective action?  Are the systems that you implement and operate best practices or merely stop-gap solutions? How are your business skills?  Can you set a vision? Can you develop a strategy?  Do you understand the macroeconomic environment of your organization?   Can you lead a major project to a successful conclusion?  This session will explore the role of business as opposed to tracking the results of the business. How are your people skills?  How good is your ability to influence others? How are successful are your negotiation skills?   How well can you communicate?  Are you a collaborator or a partner?  This section will help accountants understand that it is people skills that drive the overall success of the accounting operations. Finally, how are your Leadership skills?  Do you inspire staff or make them angry?  Do you know why your staff work for your company and you?  Do you understand what employees want from their position?  Do you know how to deal with a difficult staff person?  Can you lead difficult change?  This session will help you recognize what leadership truly is as opposed to what passes for day to day management.

Being consistently ethical is a challenge. Most of us have had to make tough choices.  This session will discuss real world cases involving thorny ethical dilemmas and how to resolve them. Being ethical is not the same as complying with the law and ethical issues are not always black and white. This session will review different professional ethical standards.  What does integrity mean in the office? If you want to learn lessons from the best in a short time, this session is for you.  Participate in engaging dialogue about how to prepare for the inevitable ethical situations.  These lessons are valuable for every business leader.

Financial accounting for trusts and estates is one of the least understood branches of accounting. It is not particularly concerned with recording income and expenses but is obsessed with determining whether receipts and expenditures are assigned to income or principal/corpus. This course will dive into this tricky area and provide a reporting guide for fiduciary accounting.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) was a major overhaul of our tax system that lowered the income tax rates for individual and corporate taxpayers and introduced the new 20% qualified business income (QBI) deduction for sole proprietors and pass-through entities. The cornerstone of this course is the comprehensive discussion of the 20% QBI deduction final regulations under IRC §199A.    **Please Note:  If you need credit reported to the IRS for this IRS approved program, please download the IRS CE request form on the Course Materials Tab and submit to kori.herrera@acpen.com

For practitioners, it’s a challenge to stay current or ahead of the curve! Change in the tax law is a virtual certainty and keeping up to date is always difficult. The 2024 elections may have an impact on the Congress, the Presidency and, probably the IRS. This ACPEN course will include a panel of national tax practitioners and experts reviewing the latest judicial, legislative and regulatory developments affecting individuals, corporations and other business entities. They will also try to project future developments! Even if Congress cannot muster enough votes to pass new legislation before the next elections, the IRS is instituting a variety of new audit programs directed at non-filers and high net worth individuals and passthrough entities. More are announced regularly! Various tax provisions will expire or benefits will be reduced if Congress fails to act. The courts and the IRS continue to churn out rulings and decisions that affect your clients. **Please Note:  If you need credit reported to the IRS for this IRS approved program, please download the IRS CE request form on the Course Materials Tab and submit to kori.herrera@acpen.com.

Isn’t it time you learned about PivotTables – Excel’s best feature? If so, participate in this session to learn PivotTables from A to Z to take full advantage of this terrific tool's many benefits.

This course is an updated overview of the single audit of state and local governments and not-for-profit organizations under the OMB Unified Circular, as well as the applicable AICPA standards for compliance audits. 

A comprehensive review of the newest version of the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s Government Auditing Standards, otherwise known as “the Yellow Book.”  The standard will affect all auditors who perform audits of government and nonprofit organizations who receive federal funds, or where application of GAO standards is required by law, regulation or contract.  It does not address the standards applicable to performance audits.

Ethical behavior is not a destination it is a journey with twists, turns, and bumps in the road. We are faced with ethical dilemmas every day. Do I speed to make it to a meeting? Do I call in sick because I need a break? When does "helping my child with their homework" become "doing it for them"? CPAs are ethical most of the time, but staying ethical is hard. It gets harder when we are under stress. This event may be a rebroadcast of a live event and the instructor will be available to answer your questions during the event.

Suitable for anyone with an interest in understanding the impacts of remote work on diverse people and promoting equitable outcomes that lead to a more inclusive work environment.

This session explores managerial accounting techniques with an emphasis on internal decision-making tools. You will appreciate a reminder regarding concepts you may not have considered since your college days. We will revisit managerial accounting concepts by illustrating practical examples that you can immediately bring back to the office!

Could you imagine a drug dealer using a credit-card terminal to accept payment? How about someone paying for a television they bought off the back of a truck with a personal check? Hard to imagine, right? Most criminals conduct their business in cash. For years, criminals kept their ill-gotten gains in cash and used it to pay for everything from real estate to jewelry to things such as private school tuition. This prompted governments around the globe to pass laws prohibiting large cash payments or, at the least, requiring such payments to be reported. These laws created the need for criminals to conceal the true source of the money or to "launder" it. To combat these threats, laws, and regulations have been enacted in countries around the globe that make financial services firms, and in some cases individuals, responsible for preventing or stopping money laundering. Within this course, we explore AML warning signs and potential mitigation techniques companies and professionals can take to help eliminate money laundering.

Sampling - Avoiding Common Mistakes on Financial Statement and Compliance Audits will describe the proper process for both attribute testing and variable sampling in financial statement and compliance audits. Sampling is an important method for determining the extent of testing controls, testing compliance, and tests of substantive details. It allows the auditor to apply procedures to less than 100% of the population yet extend results to project likely conclusions about the entire population. Note: This course is recommended as a part of a 16-hour audit skills curriculum for experienced staff auditors, while it is also appropriate for anyone who has sampling responsibilities. This event may be a rebroadcast of a live event and the instructor will be available to answer your questions during the event.

You have used Excel for years and perhaps Lotus 123 before that. And through all that time, you have repeatedly said, “One day, I’ll learn how to write macros.” Finally, that time has arrived because this four-hour program will introduce you to the wide world of Excel macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). This course teaches the fundamentals of creating and working with macros in Excel and is designed specifically for those with little experience working with macros. More specifically, taking this course will teach you how to use Excel’s Macro Recorder to write simple yet effective macros. You will also learn how to secure and share macros with other Excel users and create user-defined functions to solve specific accountant-centric problems in Excel. Further, you will learn how to create macros that run when a user opens a workbook and VBA basics. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn how to begin working with macros – one of Excel’s most powerful tools.

Yellow Book and Single Audit engagements are considered must select engagements for Peer Review. This course will cover the Yellow Book independence requirements which are required any time an auditor is performing a Yellow Book or Single Audit even when the engagement is for a for-profit entity.  We'll take a look at the major changes in the 2024 Compliance Supplement as well as the changes to the Uniform Guidance. We'll close with major deficiencies identified by the federal agencies and peer reviewers. 

The need for a forensic accountant has grown in the last two decades, with more expected in the future. From oil well spills to divorces - from stealing trust funds to partnership disputes - forensic accountants are needed to find and calculate losses. They are financial detectives that are needed to explain the money story to attorneys, judges, and juries. If you are interested in starting a forensic accounting practice or adding on this service to your existing firm, this course is for you. In this presentation, you will know what service to provide possible clients, how to find those clients, and the cost-effective ways to start the forensic accounting practice. Your instructor has over 20 years of experience as a special agent with IRS-Criminal Investigation where he conducted investigations into tax and money laundering crimes across the globe. After his successful investigative career, he started a CPA firm from scratch that focused on forensic accounting. He shares the successes and failures in starting a forensic accounting practice, including getting the right credentials, various ways of marketing to potential clients, closing the deal with engagement letters, and delivering the service to the client. This event may be a rebroadcast of a live event and the instructor will be available to answer your questions during the event.

This course will cover all pronouncements of the FASB relevant to nonpublic entities. It will be presented in two distinct sections: First, we will identify all Accounting Standards Updates (ASUs) issued by the FASB in 2023 and 2024, as well as those ASUs issued in prior years that become effective in 2024. For each pronouncement, we will identify the topic or topics affected, the most significant provisions, how the provisions affect financial reporting and disclosure, and, when possible, the reasons for the change. This will enable those associated with the GAAP financial statements of nonpublic entities to determine which pronouncements affect them or their clients, requiring further research. In the second segment, we will look at the most common financial statement elements that have changed in recent years. It will include an in-depth analysis that will demonstrate how these elements have traditionally been accounted for and how they have evolved, concluding with the current requirements for reporting and disclosing.

Would you like to find important documents in 10 seconds or less? Would you like to ensure your digital information is safe and secure? Would you like to improve workflow efficiency? Of course, you would, and with some planning and guidance, you will realize these and other benefits of a paperless office. Naturally, no one expects a fully "paperless" office, but reducing the amount of paper we shuffle can offer tremendous rewards. This course will teach you the best practices and proven processes for effective document management. Participating in this program will teach you how to implement simple, inexpensive document management systems at an individual, workgroup, or small business level. You will also learn about sophisticated and comprehensive document management systems appropriate for larger offices and organizations, including systems with automated workflow processing. Your instructor will guide you through issues such as digitizing paper files, exporting and importing data from specialized applications into a document management system, essential hardware and software considerations, and the policies necessary to facilitate a successful office. Upon completing this course, you will have a comprehensive understanding of your options and a clear direction for implementing your version of the Paperless Office.

Though many clients see Social Security as a government benefit, it is a covered worker's investment asset to be managed like any other asset. Examine issues like how Social Security benefits are calculated, identifying benefit-claiming strategies, and what spouses can do now to maximize benefits at retirement. You'll learn how Social Security works and explore common planning situations-including workers with and without spouses, sandwich-generation families with dependent parents and minor children, and surviving and/or divorced spouses-and techniques to maximize your clients' benefits.