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.

Over my 15 years of doing external, internal and IT audit, I’ve realised that the following tools are very useful for any aspiring CPA who wants to do well in his craft in auditing, taxation or accounting.

Mastering these tools will help increase your level of professionalism in your service to your employer, business or organisation.

Let’s take a look at what are the three (3) essential tools for a CPA.

1) The Calculator
The CPA doesn’t need a fancy scientific calculator all the time, he just needs a reliable 14 digit calculator with big buttons to help him number crunch rows and columns of figures. It’s not complicated, when you first start out and even as you are managing people than doing the actual accounting, auditing or tax work, there will be times when you need to ascertain if the figures given to you are correct and accurate before you sign off on that piece of work.

In comes your trust calculator. 14 digits works for most instances as it handles up to billion dollar figures. Don’t think you won’t encounter that many zeros in your career. If you work in rupees or rupiah, the chances of using the full 14 digits becomes real.

Whether you are a retiree who’s number crunching the financial statements of your listed company during the annual general meeting or an analyst/accountant in your cubicle crunching out the figures, the calculator will stand you in good stead if you learn to use it proficiently.

2) The Worksheet/Spreadsheet
Some of you who aspire to be CPA cannot even remember that there were computer applications known as Lotus 1-2-3. You were born in the days of Microsoft Excel worksheet and even during the days of Open Office.

No matter which flavour you use, the excel worksheet or open office spreadsheet will come very useful for preparing financial, costing and operational statistics to drive your organisation’s information needs.
Worksheets can be used for simple adding and subtracting of figures to form your net worth statement or can be as complicated as financial tools to generate “what-if” analysis and sensitivity analysis. All the present value, future value and cash flow analysis can be generated using the formulas and functions within the spreadsheet.
Mastering the spreadsheet makes you someone who will be very useful to the organisation and to yourself as well.

3) Ability to Communicate in Writing/Speech
The ability to communicate is critical in work-life. For CPAs, it becomes even more important because you are a specialist. Many people will claim not to understand accounting/audit/tax terms and terminologies so it’s critical that you are able to explain it to them in their own language.
Make use of less jargon, explain accounting terms to people in their own words will help both in written and spoken form as you communicate with everyone about the figures and facts.

What other tools do you think a modern CPA needs to have?

Share with Panzer in the comments section!

Be well and prosper.