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The CPA profession has played a critical role in helping small businesses achieve forgivable loans through the Paycheck Protection Program by leveraging new tools and capabilities. In this session, leaders from CPA.com and fintech company Biz2Credit will share how thousands of firms expanded their advisory services via the CPA Business Funding Portal to provide business relief for clients during economic recovery efforts. You'll hear from these experts exactly what steps firms have taken to make fintech a central part of their services for clients through PPP and loan forgiveness. They'll also share best practices and insights on how your firm can expand into business financing advisory services to deliver greater value to clients beyond PPP.
Objectives:
- Identify how firms leveraged the CPA Business Funding Portal to help clients receive PPP loans
- Recognize how your firm can address specific needs clients may have when it comes to business financing and working capital
- Discover best practices and insights on how your firm can expand into business financing advisory services long-term
This session will allow the participants to understand the role of IT in performing audits and how to properly use the IT to make the audit more efficient. Common problems encountered in Peer Review will be discussed and how to avoid these as you increase the use of IT. Enhancing Audit Quality (EAQ) initiative will be covered. The links to EAQ and Peer Review will be illustrated.
Objectives:
- Discover the role of IT in the current audit environment.
- Identify ways to enable firms to use IT to be more efficient and effective in their audits.
2020 was a unique time to lead a practice. There were many DEI related circumstances that impacted firms where leaders were unsure how to navigate. It uncovered diversity focus areas that needed revisiting, and identified the need for difficult conversations to take place among peers. In this panel discussion, attendees will learn how to better maneuver through these different situations, understand steps that need to be taken to advance DEI in their firms, and hear tips for how to handle and manage difficult conversations. Panelists will share and discuss their experiences and the importance of being able to respond appropriately in times of crisis.
Objectives:
- Determine how to lead and move teams forward in times of uncertainty.
- Identify skills and tools that will advance DEI in your organization.
- Discover how to make the uncomfortable comfortable when leading teams.
The world is moving from products and services to subscriptions, favoring access and transformations over ownership and deliverables. The advantages to a subscription model are many, including: Predictable revenue; not selling services, but creating annuities with a lifetime value that far exceeds whatever you paid to acquire them; collective knowledge of your customers, which is a competitive advantage that cannot be duplicated; the customer relationship is at the center of the firm; not pricing a product or service, but rather a series of customer transformations, peace of mind, and convenience; and you can predict demand and plan capacity more effectively.
Implementing a subscription business model for firms is hard work and not for everyone because it requires professionals to think differently than they have in the past about what it is, exactly, that customers value. Join Ron Baker, founder of VeraSage Institute, for a thought-provoking session on why and how the subscription business model will be an inevitable part of the firm of the future.
Objectives:
- Identify strategies utilized by businesses that have made the transition to a subscription-based model.
- Differentiate the nine types of subscription business models.
- Determine the psychology of selling subscriptions.
- Identify how to develop new metrics and accounting information to represent the economics of a subscription business.
- Analyze the three types of adoption approaches to creating a subscriber base.
During this interactive session, attendees will run disruption map exercises to identify 2nd and 3rd level implications of emerging trends. These findings enable you to recognize opportunities as well as challenges, so that your firm can design new business models that support the rapidly changing landscape.
Objectives:
- Recognize the broader impact of emerging tech on the future of your firm, and client’s businesses
- Discover a new exercise to map out future disruptors
- Identify causal impacts that can create new business models
The much-debated ruling by the US Supreme Court forcing the NCAA to alter long-standing financial policies around collegiate athletics, athletes and teams speaking out on social issues, and the Tokyo Olympics taking place amid a global pandemic has made the intersection of business and sports more apparent and newsworthy than ever.
The role of the trusted, professional financial advisor is critical from the onset of an athlete’s career requiring an understanding of financial literacy, wealth management and compliance. Given the stunningly short, average length of a player’s career, preparing for the day the buzzer sounds should start well before they sign their first professional contract.
This session features lessons learned from three groundbreaking professionals - Amobi Okugo, Jeremy Bloom and Nicole Lynn - each bringing their own unique perspectives on overcoming adversities, maximizing opportunities and navigating an often treacherous business environment on and off the field.
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated change in the profession. This panel discussion will provide insights into the trends and issues impacting the profession and how these are creating new opportunities to thrive in the future.
Objectives:
- Describe the current economic environment and important issues impacting the accounting and finance profession.
- Recognize how accountants are leading in economic recovery efforts and hear how the Association is supporting them through advocacy, resources and learning.
The audit tools many firms rely on today are inefficient and often lead to common missteps found in peer review. Add to that, the accounting profession faces growing pressure to change how audits are performed to meet quality expectations under increasingly compressed timelines.
The real opportunity to auditing differently is the intersection of audit content with available data and emerging technology. This data-driven cloud audit will enhance quality, drive efficiencies, and allow firms to service clients in a way that wasn't possible before. During this 25-minute education lab, we will discuss:
- Why it matters that the regulatory bodies now expect 'a different way to work'.
- How to manage change as you adopt a new auditing model.
- Ways an integrated audit approach helps you get to your ‘new model’ faster.
Attendees will leave this session with steps for creating their firm's digital transformation plan.
Objectives:
- Identify the technology that aligns with the new auditing model.
- Create a plan to successfully transform your audit practice.
The answer lies in embracing the right technology and focusing our workflow on the right thing like accountants did before technology turned our industry upside down. Join us to learn about the history of our broken workflow and what can finally be done to fix it.
Learn how dynamic father and son team Bob and Davin Carey used succession planning to add wealth management services to their multi-generational CPA tax practice that skyrocketed their business.
Objectives:
- Business Succession Planning – Develop a strategy to grow your practice and plan for the future.
- Wealth Management with a Tax Focus – Leverage your tax expertise to offer holistic wealth management
Clients expect you to deliver your services in a way that is convenient, collaborative, and safe during these challenging times. Explore how automation is transforming the tax engagement, with a focus on digital, fillable client organizers, to support remote client relationships, enable collaboration, and reduce firm frustration. From the engagement letter and client organizers to collecting e-signatures and invoicing, client touchpoints include manual, labor-intensive tasks that are frustrating and far too time consuming. Meet the SafeSend Suite and see how it helps automate your tax process.
As a profession, we have been digitizing for years; the events of 2020 revealed where we had a need, and an opportunity, to create the next digital client experience. We will continue to evolve the “next normal” in client interaction and service delivery, as the way we work shifts and becomes more decentralized.
In this session, hear from innovative practitioners about the strategies that are establishing the next level of a digital experience for their firms. We will explore what you can do to foster opportunities given the shift in mindset for both staff and clients, while innovating new services that exceed client expectations.
Objectives:
- Discover the new characteristics of advising in a remote environment
- Recognize what the “next normal” looks like, and how we continue to shape it
- Identify new training requirements for clients and teams to support the transition
- Design strategies to maintain connectedness and have boundaries with clients in a flex environment
Happiness, Resiliency, Leadership, and Performance - what do all of these have in common? Research shows people with high usage of EQ skills are happier, more resilient when facing obstacles, better leaders, and stronger performers. Furthermore, EQ is the largest predictor of job success no matter your field! Discover more about EQ, learn tips to increase your usage of some EQ skills to improve your happiness, resiliency, leadership skills, and overall performance in your personal and professional life, and apply what is learned to build a personal leadership action plan.
Objectives:
- Discover what EQ is and is not
- Recognize the importance of EQ as an Accounting/Finance professional
- Analyze the EQ-i 2.0 Model
- Review examples of everyday EQ at work
- Identify tips on how to increase your usage of some EQ skills to improve your happiness, resiliency, leadership skills, and overall performance in your personal and professional life
This session will cover accounting and auditing new developments, hot topics, and questions and answers coming through the CPEA and Technical Hotline during the year.
Objectives:
- Identify questions and answers on accounting issues, including any COVID related accounting developments for private companies.
- Discover commonly asked questions and answers for practitioners performing compilations, reviews, audits and attest engagements.
The year 2020 was unlike any other - requiring each of us to quickly pivot and transform virtually all aspects of our personal and professional lives. Working from home, video meetings and the elimination of business travel became the "new normal" in just a few day's times. But these significant changes also presented tremendous opportunity for innovation and digital transformation. Join Inspector Gadget has he examines the latest technology and products supporting these rapid changes, and explore what is next. Technology has never been more critical and impactful than it is today. Make certain you have the essential details you need to navigate your next steps.
Objectives:
- Recall the latest technology trends and the impact these trends will have on next generation devices.
- Identify where to wisely invest in new technology, and what to avoid.
- Choose technology initiatives based on greatest impact.
This session will explore the pros and cons of internal vs. external succession. It will highlight the benefits, challenges, risks, and opportunities that should be considered in determining which pathway is best for your firm. The presenter will use actual case studies of firms that have had success (and failures) with both internal and external succession. The presentation will drill down on the critical areas that drive successful succession including: Required Investment Capital; Leadership Succession; Sustainable Practice Growth; Firm Profitability and Partner Compensation; and Firm Valuation and Deferred Compensation/Retirement Benefits.
Objectives:
- Distinguish the life cycles of a CPA firm.
- Identify why the pillars of succession – leadership, growth, talent, and client service need to be repopulated every decade.
- Outline how to assess the pros and cons of internal vs. external succession.
In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, maintaining the status quo is substantially falling behind. Leading firms realize this and have deployed innovation and change strategies that meet the future needs of clients. Learn key steps and strategies top-performing firms are using to identify, implement, and influence positive and profitable change within their organizations.
Objectives:
- Identify key steps and strategies you can use to influence positive change.
- Discover what top performing firms are doing around change management strategies.
Over the past decade the growth of Client Advisory Services (CAS) has developed more demand for budgeting and forecasting services. 2020 grew that demand exponentially as businesses needed quality, and nimble forecasting as the environment was changing quickly. For many accounting professionals they were heads down in spreadsheets trying to scale their ability to efficiently offer this valuable information and service to clients.
This session is an opportunity to hear from process innovators that will share tips on how to develop a scalable forecasting and budgeting service offering to clients, ways to make this service timely for clients, and create a new profit center within your firm. These experts in budgeting and forecasting will share data to collect, questions to ask, and tools to be more productive.
The volatility of 2021 makes these services highly valuable to clients. Are you working in the most time efficient and profitable way?
Objectives:
- Put on your "CFO hat" to evaluate the key drivers of any business
- Assess tips to develop forecasts in a more timely manner
- Interpret how the latest accounting automation technology is speeding up and improving financial forecasting