Certified Public Accountant

safires · 06-07-2006 11:59pm #1

Hi, I'm considering changing careers to become an accountant. I've read some of the treads here and have an understanding of the merits of the ACCA and ACA but i can't find out much about CPA. Could anybody let me know the pros and cons of choosing CPA over the other two bodies.

Thanks in advance,

Safires

kluivert · 07-07-2006 9:51am

CPA - Generally focused at private practice accounting firms.

CPA was rumoured to be joining the ACA some years back.

Working in practice, any qualified CPA with a valid practising certificate can audit and sign off on companies' accounts.

During training, CPA students can work both in or out of practice.

During training, CPA students do not have to commit to a training contract with one employer, allowing flexibility and the freedom to move around.

CPAs may choose to sit their final level exams over four consecutive exam sittings i.e. two consecutive years in any order they choose.

CPA students can choose from amongst a wide range of approved educators throughout Ireland.

The CPA qualification has wide international recognition.

CPA students do not need to be in relevant employment when starting their exams.

CPA members and students are supported by an Irish-based and controlled Institute. So all technical support - including that concerning Irish tax and business matters - is relevant and easily accessible.

charba · 07-07-2006 8:52pm

That was really useful thanks.

I am trying to make the same decision, can anyone outline the benefits of ACCA? or tell me what the difference is between them.

rollover · 08-07-2006 4:30pm

CPA - Generally focused at private practice accounting firms.
same as ACCA

CPA was rumoured to be joining the ACA some years back.

Working in practice, any qualified CPA with a valid practising certificate can audit and sign off on companies' accounts.
as can ACCA
During training, CPA students can work both in or out of practice.
as can ACCA
During training, CPA students do not have to commit to a training contract with one employer, allowing flexibility and the freedom to move around.
as can ACCA

CPAs may choose to sit their final level exams over four consecutive exam sittings i.e. two consecutive years in any order they choose.
as can ACCA
CPA students can choose from amongst a wide range of approved educators throughout Ireland.
as can ACCA including BPP & private colleges
The CPA qualification has wide international recognition.
ditto ACCA
CPA students do not need to be in relevant employment when starting their exams.

CPA members and students are supported by an Irish-based and controlled Institute. So all technical support - including that concerning Irish tax and business matters - is relevant and easily accessible.
ACCA has an Irish branch........

i am as interested as charba in the differences between CPA,ACCA,ICAI
and they are not huge afaik(am currently doing ACCA exams with a firm of CPA's)

kluivert · 08-07-2006 8:43pm

Try finding a job in England with CPA and then try find a job in England with a ACCA and see who recoginises CPA over ACCA

Kinetic^ · 09-07-2006 12:32am

Yep have been made aware of the trouble travelling with ACCA recently through a guy I used to work with.

kluivert · 10-07-2006 9:26am

Keyser Soze 5 wrote:

Yep have been made aware of the trouble travelling with ACCA recently through a guy I used to work with.

Trouble with ACCA qualification aboard?

TheFredJ · 10-07-2006 9:36am

one of the most obvious differences is the relative pecking order of the different qualifications, which is:

aca
acca
cima
cpa

this matters if you want to make a career out of being an accountant, and not merely get an accounting qualification. that pecking order will always rule your career progress, relative to others.

cpa is generally thought to be the easiest set of exams to pass. aca is probably the hardest to get into.

Cyrus · 10-07-2006 9:51am

Im personally aca qualified, my dad and brother both are CPA (well my bro is repeating 2 of his finals)

It is likely at some stage that the aca and cpa will merge.

Regarding kluiverts point about going to england its probably fair enough, but goto america with acca and you will be up against it, CPA is by far and away the most recognised qualification and, given that, i would imagine that it has a better worldwide recognition than any of the other accouting qualifications?

Despite its reputation in ireland ACA is really only of use in Ire/UK/Australia, dunno about ACCA would imagine its more international but im not sure?

ACCA and or CPA exams are exceptionally difficult it seems, i know my brother did the CPA finals a few weeks ago and the pass rate was below 40%, when i did my ACA finals last summer the pass rate in my firm (one of the big 4) was 90% or so.

This would be partially due to the fact that there is some difference in the calibre of student doing aca vs acca and cpa (im not being funny about it but all the big 4 trainees do ACA and would generally be University honours graduates sometimes with a masters degree) whereas more often people doing ACCA/CPA are working in smaller practices, might not have the same academic background and dont get the same support and study leave, but that aside i would imagine that acca and cpa exams would be harder than aca.

Realistically if you are staying in Ireland it wont matter what you do, but if you ever plan on going to the states id go for CPA

Edit - it appears CPA ireland and CPA in the US are unrelated?

Cyrus · 10-07-2006 9:55am

I cant agree with FredJ, there is no way CIMA is seen above CPA? For a start a CIMA accountant to the best my knowledge cannot practice on his own?

And it seems that CPA exams are harder to pass not easier?

As i said im ACA qualified but ive had a good look into this, for some reason the CPA is looked done on a bit in Ireland, but it seems its more thro ignorance than anything else

Cyrus · 10-07-2006 10:08am

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPA

which disproves my point re the CPA in the US

doh!

TheFredJ · 10-07-2006 10:37am

cyrus - there's more to being an accountant than public practice. more of us work in industry than in practice. many of us who started in practice ultimately moved to industry. most of the qualifications allow you to switch between practice and industry, but cima is the most industry focussed. i would rank it ahead of cpa anyday - the real argument is whether it should be ahead or behind acca.

as for your confusion of cpa over here with real cpa's in america - oh dear, you do have a lot to learn.

one other point that is worth saying about the irish cpa qualification. one of the accountant jokes has it that cpa stands for car park attendant. which offers some guidance on the esteem in which the qualification is generally held.

the international transferability of the different qualifications varies from country to country, and you'd really need to check it out yourself, if you're thinking of working abroad. obviously, wherever you go, you're going to have a whole new set of company and tax laws to get your head around.

Cyrus · 10-07-2006 10:47am

TheFredJ wrote:

cyrus - there's more to being an accountant than public practice. more of us work in industry than in practice. many of us who started in practice ultimately moved to industry. most of the qualifications allow you to switch between practice and industry, but cima is the most industry focussed. i would rank it ahead of cpa anyday - the real argument is whether it should be ahead or behind acca.

as for your confusion of cpa over here with real cpa's in america - oh dear, you do have a lot to learn.

one other point that is worth saying about the irish cpa qualification. one of the accountant jokes has it that cpa stands for car park attendant. which offers some guidance on the esteem in which the qualification is generally held.

the international transferability of the different qualifications varies from country to country, and you'd really need to check it out yourself, if you're thinking of working abroad. obviously, wherever you go, you're going to have a whole new set of company and tax laws to get your head around.

Firstly i retracted my statement about CPA US vs CPA Ire, when i realised i was wrong.

Of course theres more to being an accountant that working in practice, but with Cima you dont have the option.

the crap about car park attendant is just silly nonsense, you are always going to get nonsense like that, again borne out of ignorance. If CPA is so bad then why is one of our most senior professional standards directors a CPA? Several of the Deloitte and Touche partners are CPA (they are family friends, my Dad trained with a firm taken over by Deloittes in Cork many moons ago) and the ACA and CPA have mooted a joining together several times, in fact if i recall the ACA wanted a CPA as their president not too long ago.

Im not having a go but this is the kind of snobbery that puts people off and in my opinion its unwarrented, what reasons do you have for your disdain of the qualification apart from car park attendant joke.

Its like most of the people in here look down of people in small practices just because we are one of the biggest, doesnt make us better or worse but a lot of people do it, must make them feel better about themselves?

again as i said im ACA anyway so im not trying to defend myself

TheFredJ · 10-07-2006 11:01am

Cyrus wrote:

the crap about car park attendant is just silly nonsense, you are always going to get nonsense like that, again borne out of ignorance.

the fact is, it exists. you may not like, i may not like it, but it exists. i mentioned it because it is worth knowing. you know that snobbery exists within the profession. you've admitted that yourself. it's best to know these things at the outset.

Cyrus wrote:

If CPA is so bad then why is one of our most senior professional standards directors a CPA? Several of the Deloitte and Touche partners are CPA (they are family friends, my Dad trained with a firm taken over by Deloittes in Cork many moons ago)

possibly because d+t took over a lot of small practices with goofd client bases which were run by cpa's.

Cyrus wrote:

the ACA and CPA have mooted a joining together several times, in fact if i recall the ACA wanted a CPA as their president not too long ago.

consolidation of the professional bodies has been talked about for as long as i can remember, which is a pretty long time at this stage. i personally wouldn't expect an acca/cpa merger until the long mooted acca/cima merger gets completed, or fully and finally ruled out.

Cyrus · 10-07-2006 11:07am

fair enough

anyway its like this, if you are any good it wont really matter you'll get on okay, my old man is a CPA and he has his own practice and its doing very well, i suppose if you have your own practice clients dont really care what you are as long as you are good.

If you want to work in dublin and in industry id try and get a training contract and do ACA tho, probably make life easier.

just out of curiousity FredJ which qualification did u do? ACA aswell?

TheFredJ · 10-07-2006 11:24am

if you want to work in industry, without meaning offence, aca is a waste of time, unless you're into the snob value of. the entry bar is v high and the exams are far from easy. acca offers you the chance to go into practice, but if you know you're only going to work in industry then there's no need to look any further than cima - its speciaity is industry.

i qualified acca. i've worked in practice (small over here, large in london) and industry both sides of the irish sea. my elder brother qualified aca. my younger brother qualified cima. my lil sis is currently trying cpa, so we can have the full set in the family.

Cyrus · 10-07-2006 11:37am

bit like us then

my dad cpa, im aca, brother cpa and my girlfriend is doing Acca!!

are the ACA exams considered difficult? as i said i did the finals last summer and found them very easy, in fact they were the easiest exams ive done since 3rd year in college? i also did the Macc in smurfit and found that much harder.

I ended up with an average mark of something like 73/74% without studying too hard(that said i got 3 months off so i had plenty of time), im not boasting at all and i hope i dont sound as if i am, but my brother and girlfriend (both bright people, especially the missus) are finding the ACCA and CPA exams very difficult? My girlfriend works in funds so i suppose accountancy is a bit foreign to her.

TheFredJ · 10-07-2006 12:04pm

aca is difficult inofar as it has a high entry bar. it's easy peasy insofar as your contract entitles you to more study leave.

but with acca, cima and cpa, your study leave is down to what you can haggle out of your employer. some are kinder than others. some are mean as hell. i think i was generally getting one week per subject - which gave me a month off for my finals. which is no match on your three months.

the difficulty of the exams is not always down to the difficulty of the questions set - it's a trade off between a lot of things. the usual work-life-exams balance that's hard to maintain. again, that's something that's important to know before setting off down the road of getting an accounting qualification. are you going to have enough time to set aside to study? the different professional bodies have different paths through their exams, which take account of these difficulties. that could be a more important deciding factor than anything else.

most of the people i know who've had difficulty with the exams ultimately admit that they just didn't study hard enough, they don't blame the exams for being too tough, they admit that they gave the job more emphasis or their life more emphasis and the study not enough. it's a hard balance to strike.

TheFredJ · 10-07-2006 12:14pm

i should state the difficulty of the exams is also down to the relevenace of the subjects you've to study to what you're actually doing on a day-to-day basis in your job. which is why i would say doing aca in industry is hard, as a lot of what you're learning about is more practice-orientated, things you won't come across in your job. when you're actually working with stuff you're learning, the learning is quite easy. it all gets difficult when you're learning things that never appear in your day-to-day job.

spaceballs · 08-08-2006 8:48pm

Personally I believe that the company/firm you train with is almost more important than the qualification you end up with. And when choosing somewhere to considering places to train you kind of need to know what area in accounting you want to end up in.

Ie. if you want to go into and stay in practice in Ireland, I would recommend training in a medium sized firm, too small and you won't get any experience dealing with bigger sized clients, too big, and this is just from my experience dealing with people who trained in big 4 companies, whilst they were able to put a perfectly good audit file together generally their actual accounting knowledge is quite limited as they don't get the overall view on jobs that working on some smaller clients allows. A friend of mine was actually told not to train in a Big 4 firm by one of their own partners who was a family friend.

If you want to go into practice and travel with your qualification then train in one of the Big 4 or one of the other internationally reconised firms in the country, as the name will travel.

If you want industry and have no interest in practice then obviously train in industry.

Obviously there are a number of other sections you can go into but that's a but of a summary.

From disussions I've had with partners in a number of different firms they seem to be more concerned with the experience you have and less with the institute you trained with these days.

As an ACA I am very happy with the education I got through them but at the same time, I have come across a number of members of the institute which I wouldn't rate highly at all, and a number of members of other institutes which would be considered less fashionable (for want of a better word) who I would highly recommend to others.

One thing I would say about CPA is that I know someone who set up a practice a number of years ago and had a lot of difficulty getting the relevant technical assistance from them at the time and he ended up so frustrated with them that he ended up switching institutes to the ACCA and his practice has grown significantly since. Although this is a good while ago so it may have changed since.

Certified Public Accountant

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