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Flickr image "Chesire Cat" by fofurasfelinas

One of the areas that I encountered in my career as an auditor is this animal know as CAATS. It’s not the meow-meow animal we all know and love but CAATs is an acronym to refer to Computer-assisted audit techiques or audit tools.

ACL and IDEA
Starting out and now continuing in my career as a Certified Public Accountant (Non-practising) and Certified Internal Auditor, I came to understand and make use a generalised audit software known as ACL or Audit Command Language back in the mid 90s. This allowed me to understand a bit more about data and how to analyse relationships between certain financial figures and transactions and to zoom in on suspicious transactions.

If you are a CPA or aspiring CPA and CIA to be, it bodes well if you are open to Information Technology and can make use of at least one type of CAATs be it Excel spreadsheets or more sophisticated tools such as ACL or IDEA.

Leveraging on IT is arguably one of the most common things you would need to do as a CPA or CIA and in this technologically changing world, you cannot be effective in your career as a CPA unless you can harness the power of technology to help you balance your accounts, find interesting trends and relationships between operational data and the financial figures and be able to make use of such tools to put into place fraud mitigation strategies as an auditor.

In my own career, I’ve realised that being a CPA requires diverse skills. Being comfortable with figures is one and the ability to apply accounting and audit knowledge are important basic skills. But other overall corporate career skills such as written expression, oral expression and emotional quotient all help to make you more effective in a corporate setting.

What special super-duper ability do you have to enhance your edge in your own career?

Share with Panzer in the comments section.

Be well and prosper.