Every company has both tangible and intangible assets. While not appearing on a CPA Firm’s balance sheet, the biggest asset a professional services firm has is its people. Profitability and longevity for a CPA Firm hinges on its ability to maximize its most important resource, the time and knowledge of its people.
How do you do that? Regardless of the service provided, engagement teams must be trained to be both effective and efficient. Notice how effectiveness comes before efficiency? That is because there is nothing more inefficient than to make more efficient that which should not be done at all.
It is critical for engagement teams to not only know WHAT to do and HOW to do it in compliance with professional and regulatory standards…but also WHY they are doing it. It is only with the understanding of WHY that personnel can make sound qualitative judgments about improving efficiency.
Some training is able to be obtained “on-the-job” with proper supervision and review. However, it is essential for quality and profitability for CPA Firms to purposefully invest in other forms of training.
The need for outside training is particularly true when a firm provides relatively few services in a particular service area. For example, some smaller firms perform only a handful of audits. These audits have a less chance of being in compliance with professional and regulatory standards without proper supervision and training. Equally important, these audits have less chance of being profitable. Focused training on both aspects of effectiveness and efficiency is critical to a successful CPA firm practice.
Surgent’s Customized Audit Skills Training Program is uniquely designed to be the most flexible training program available. Under the Surgent approach, your firm has the unique opportunity to control the exact content, duration and delivery format to meet your firm’s specific needs. For example, you can register for one of our pre-scheduled multi-day progressive audit skills training live webinars, or you can create your own self-study program from our menu of over fifty on-demand self-study webcasts. Click here for more information.
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