CPE + Events Catalog

Many entities look to their CPA as a trusted advisor when tackling complex accounting topics. This is more relevant now than ever. The FASB's big three accounting pronouncements involving revenue recognition, leasing and credit losses have placed a magnifying glass on this reality. Practitioners need to exercise caution to ensure they maintain independence as they assist their review and audit clients with such matters, as well as with compilation engagements. This course addresses these issues and explores best practices and guidance provided by the AICPA's Code of Professional Conduct. **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.

Ready to make radical leaps in your critical thinking? In a world of rapid change and unreliable information, we need the ability to separate fact from fiction, recognize flawed assumptions, and have clarity under pressure. This course will teach you how to audit your thinking and build effective reasoning strategies for all types of situations. You will achieve dramatic improvements in judgement, problem solving, memory, and learning. This course will make you more flexible, adaptable, creative and resilient, and provide a cognitive toolkit you can carry for life. 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 provides an Update of cryptocurrency basics and use cases. Learn the latest trends in crypto applications and the current state of accounting applications of cryptocurrency. It will cover the appropriate accounting for cryptocurrency and address some of the challenges in accounting for cryptocurrency.

Getting ready for busy season involves not only knowing the tax rules for 2024, but also knowing how those rules are incorporated into the IRS tax forms practitioners will be using to prepare 2024 tax returns. This course provides tax return preparer attendees with an up-to-date review of important new tax forms, key tax developments, and tax law changes as they are reflected in IRS forms for 2024 and IRS filing issues and deadlines as they relate to 2024.

S corporation taxation has a lot of pieces. There are helpful elections you can make that can potentially save your client money, but there are also rigid rules to adhere to. For example, if there is more than one class of stock, it can terminate the S corporation election. Learning how to successfully navigate these rules can make all the difference. In this course, we will discuss some of the more common specialty areas experienced by practitioners - late filing relief for S corporation elections, disproportionate distributions, and selling S corporation shares. While these items may not come up on every single Form 1120-S, you will be able to add more value to clients when they do.

An essential class for those who routinely face complex, high-value decisions in high-stress environments, including CEOs and CFOs, first responders and surgical teams, policymakers, auditors, or investigators. This class takes you beyond critical thinking and teaches you how to use your cognitive strengths to develop a thinking system-powerful cognitive tools that enable better thinking under pressure, deep-structure insights for powerful problem-solving abilities and highly effective communication when it counts, all while building ongoing mental wellness for clarity and avoiding burnout. Learn how to audit your thinking, synthesize your ideas and achieve clarity under pressure. The tools you learn will benefit all areas of your life. You will be a more flexible, adaptable, creative, resilient and confident thinker.

QuickBooks remains one of the leading accounting solutions for small and growing businesses and Intuit has added numerous advanced features to the application over the past few releases. In this seminar, you will learn how to take advantage of many of QuickBooks’ new and advanced features to solve important issues. For example, you will learn advanced inventory management techniques, including the ability to change the default costing methodology in QuickBooks, and implementing lot and serial number tracking. You will also learn how to build complete sets of financial statements in Excel that link in real-time to underlying QuickBooks data files and how to create multi-company financial statements. Additionally, you will learn how to put the Client Data Review feature to work to streamline the process of identifying and correcting errors and closing accounting periods in QuickBooks. Knowing how to take advantage of the advanced tools and features available can determine your level of success when working with QuickBooks. Take advantage of this opportunity to learn about QuickBooks’ “deep” features so that you maximize your effectiveness with the application.

In this 2024 Year-End Payroll Update, we will provide a robust overview of the critical year-end payroll topics affecting employers and payroll professionals, such as reconciling your payroll returns to your W-2s, annual updates and law changes that impact payroll, as well as some tips and tricks you can implement immediately that will help you improve the quality of your year-end payroll process. The most consistent thing about payroll is that it changes EVERY YEAR. And those changes go into effect on January 1. So don't delay. This event may be a rebroadcast of a live event and the instructor will be available to answer your questions during the event.

What can you do to enhance your commitment to the highest ethical standards of the profession? How will doing so bring you more business? In this unique and engaging ethics course, the instructor, Dr. Bruce Weinstein, The Ethics Guy (R), reveals ten crucial qualities of CPAs. They are: 1. Honesty 2. Accountability 3. Care 4. Courage 5. Fairness 6. Gratitude 7. Humility 8. Loyalty 9. Patience 10. Presence (focus or mindfulness) You're already a good CPA and a good person. This course will show you how to be even better. The result will be greater satisfaction in your professional relationships, a deeper commitment to the profession of accounting, and much more business. Please note that this is a stand-alone course for 2 CPE credits in Behavioral Ethics, but you'll maximize your ROI by also taking "Ethics: How to Build and Keep Your A-Team". Together these courses are two of the surest pathways to sustained success in accounting. 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 dive into the fundamentals of fiduciary accounting and provide a reporting guide for determining whether receipts and expenditures are assigned to income or principal/corpus. 

People often judge our intelligence, professionalism, and competence in our grammar and punctuation. Don't let simple errors undermine your messaging or hamper your organization's ability to move ahead. This fast-paced webinar will teach you the secrets to common grammar and punctuation issues, including singular-plural agreement, sentence structure, and dangling modifiers. You'll review the right usage of the comma, hyphen, apostrophe, and semicolon. In addition, you can ask the instructor questions about any aspect of this topic. This program moves quickly as terrifying topics in school become easy to understand.

Governmental entities are the second largest victims of embezzlement. This seminar examines recent events involving theft of public money and circumstances that allowed the fraud to occur. Case studies we examine include the 2012 $54 million embezzlement from the City of Dixon by Rita Crundwell. The events that impacted the small Illinois town of 16,000 residents was the largest governmental fraud case to date, and spanned an astonishing 20 years. This remarkable story inspired an award-winning documentary, "All the Queen's Horses." We will also examine factors that led to scandals involving the Baptist Foundation of Arizona, World Com, Collin Street Bakery and the Ohio American Cancer Society, among others. This course is ideal for CPAs, government finance personnel, all Internal Auditors, lawyers, governance professionals, accountants and human resource personnel. This event may be a rebroadcast of a live event and the instructor will be available to answer your questions during the event.

Is your tech stack aligned with your organizational goals? Is there duplication among software titles? Is your hardware where it needs to be? Get answers to these and other questions in this session!

The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) were implemented to improve the lives of employees. FMLA allows eligible employees to take job-protected leave for their own serious health conditions or to care for sick family members. The ADA was intended to ensure "equality of opportunity" and "economic self-sufficiency" for individuals with disabilities. Yet both laws have proven challenging for employers. These laws are complex with rules that can be confusing and often misunderstood. This webinar is designed to provide information, guidelines, and examples of the key concepts under both laws.

This session will highlight recent cases of ethical failures and fraud and will highlight concepts of trust, personal accountability, responding to fraud, and the conduct expected of CPAs outlined in the Code of Professional Conduct. 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 dives into the powerful, but potentially under-utilized, capabilities of Microsoft Excel.  Designed for sophisticated users willing to approach spreadsheets from a unique perspective, this program encourages users to challenge the status quo by considering opportunities to take acceptable spreadsheets to a new level.

A significant number of projects fail to achieve their initial goals and/or are not completed within budget and their original timetable. As a team member, a CMA has a unique skill set and experiences to assist in project management. In addition to their analytical training and knowledge of budgets and controls, they typically have ongoing contacts with other professionals from a variety of backgrounds. Familiar analytical tools/techniques can be applied to managing projects. This brief program is designed to aid both experienced and less experienced participants in increasing their knowledge of, and comfort with, the steps and skills needed for success.

Most professionals routinely use Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint, but many are self-taught and, as a result, have not been exposed to the best features of these three applications. Consequently, they often use “brute force,” inefficient means when working with these three components of Microsoft Office. If that describes you, ensure you carve time out of your schedule to participate in this fourhour session. In it, you will learn how to work much more efficiently when using these tools to get better results in less time.  

More and more entities need Yellow Book engagements, including a growing number of for-profit entities. In this course, we will review the unique independence requirements in GAGAS. We'll also review the recent changes to quality management in Yellow Book. We'll close with a reminder of common deficiencies found in Yellow Book engagements. 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 explores the tests used to determine whether a worker is properly characterized as an employee or an independent contractor for tax purposes, with a focus on the cost of getting it wrong and possible Section 530 relief.  The game changing impact of the Dynamex case and AB5 will also be discussed.  **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.