5 Popular Accounting CPE Courses

Answer 1

Accounting CPE - or Continuing Professional Education - courses are extremely valuable as they are designed to educate an accountant in certain specific accounting-related fields like bankruptcy, ethics and business management.

Accounting CPE courses are meant to be taken by qualified Accountants who wish to obtain more information on certain specialty subjects like nonprofit accounting, bankruptcy, business management, ethics and business law. The courses that relate to nonprofit accounting, for instance, are designed for accounting professionals who want to learn more about matters like bookkeeping for nonprofits, preventing fraud and embezzlement in nonprofits and understanding nonprofits’ internal control systems. Those courses that concentrate on bankruptcy, however, will give the accountant a more precise understanding of, for instance, how Chapter 7 bankruptcies compare to Chapter 13 bankruptcies, how bankruptcy affects one’s credit rating and which debts are dischargeable through filing bankruptcy.

The courses relating to business management tend to be structured around subjects like marketing and rules for growing a business, and some of these courses will also include post-mortem studies on the collapse of huge corporations like Enron and Arthur Andersen. Ethics is a particularly important part of accounting and one that is often overlooked in an accountant’s enthusiasm to learn all about bookkeeping and forensic auditing. There are, however, several CPE courses that attempt to explain how the concept of ethics relates to the accounting world, and these courses concentrate on the interpretation and implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (also known as the ’Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act’).

An extensive knowledge of business law could also be extremely valuable to a practicing accountant as these professionals are often asked to consult on - or be expert witnesses in - complex corporate cases that touch on both legal and accounting issues. A business law CPE course can, however, introduce an accountant to such concepts as intellectual property and trademarks as well as to limited liability companies, and information of this type can only serve to increase an accountant’s competency.

The CPE courses available in the present day and age are many and varied, and accountants are encouraged to sign up for as many as possible.