Accounting CPD Compliance: A Mid-Year Review

As accountants and tax professionals you will no doubt be aware of the need to keep your CPD records up to date. The question is, with new ICAEW rules – is your CPD compliant?

At the time of writing, we are nearly halfway through the calendar year and so members of professional bodies with targets for CPD (and member firms) should be looking carefully at whether your teams are well on the way to compliance.

By checking progress at this point, your firm will be able to ensure that the CPD plans can be amended in good time, to avoid a rush for hours towards the end of the year when diaries are likely to be already very full.

If you need help with CPD, get more information about becoming a 20:20 Innovation member, and book a free 30-minute demo with our team today.

What are the current CPD targets?

The amount of CPD you need to do is – for all professional bodies – driven by a process of understanding your role, your clients and the changes that are happening, and then designing a training plan that ensure you can support your clients and firm.

All professional bodies also have a requirement to consider ethical training, with the ICAEW actually requiring an hour of mandatory and verifiable ethics training a year.

However, for ICAEW and ACCA members and member firms there is an extra challenge of ensuring that the hours targets are met and these are listed below:

Rules for ACCA members

ACCA members are required to complete a total of 40 relevant CPD units each year, comprising:

• At least 21 verifiable units; and
• Up to 19 non-verifiable units

Rules for ICAEW members

As noted above, this must include an hour of verifiable ethics CPD.

While the rules apply to members, ICAEW member firms are also caught and should be procedures in place to ensure they are facilitating and monitoring what members are doing. These procedures can be the subject of an on-site monitoring reviews by the ICAEW, which are starting in November 2024.

What do CPD changes mean for 20:20 Innovation members?

For members of 20:20, you can of course book a wide range of technical and practice management courses to ensure you are complying with the rules, and minimising the risk of giving poor advice to clients. Details of which 20:20 Innovation courses have been booked and watched are all available each person’s Dashboard:

Note that this can also be used to record the total CPD hours and total verifiable hours the individual should achieve.

However, there is more, the Dashboard can be used to record CPD undertaken in other ways, to give a full picture of the individual’s CPD record.

Then for administrators at your firm, you can review the position for the whole firm in “My Team’s Training”:

Get cracking

Hitting a target of 40 hours for ACCA and ICAEW members can seem like a tall order but it is doable if planned and managed over the course of the year.

Failure to properly undertake CPD will expose the member and the firm to risk of disciplinary action from their professional body, and increase the chances that incorrect advice is given to clients, which in turn could lead to an increased risk of complaints and claims.

If you would like more information on our range of courses or how to get the best out of your 20:20 Innovation Dashboard, please fill in your details below.