CPE Catalog & Events

Accounting and finance managers and executives must demonstrate sound soft skills necessary for personal growth and organizational success.  This course will provide insights into the most crtical  personal skills critical for CFOs and Controllers - or those that want to be!

Valuation techniques and cash management activities are two other tool categories that can round out your analytical toolbox. In this course we will initially discuss how to turn your financial plan into a powerful valuation engine.  We then will discuss the formation of an efficient cash management program based on solid banker relationships.  Finally, we will review Ten Steps for keeping your financial toolbox full.

With the increasing complexity and ever-changing nature of tax laws and issues, today’s accountant needs a one-day fast-paced update course focusing on the hottest Federal income tax topics affecting individuals, businesses and their owners with an emphasis of newly enacted income tax legislation. **Please Note:  If you need credit reported to the IRS for this IRS approved program, please download the IRS CE request form on the Course Materials Tab and submit to kori.herrera@acpen.com

This course is an updated overview of the single audit of state and local governments and not-for-profit organizations under the OMB Unified Circular, as well as the applicable AICPA standards for compliance audits. 

Charts and graphs are nothing new. However, many professionals struggle with building compelling visualizations. If that statement describes you, participate in this session to improve your skills in creating Excel charts and other visualizations. As a result, you will create visualizations to enhance your communication skills. This session is much more than just a seminar on fundamental charts. Instead, in this session, you will learn how to create advanced charts that are interactive, dynamic, and aesthetically pleasing – three qualities that will help to ensure that your readers and audience will understand the data you are presenting. This seminar is a must if you want to improve your communication skills.

The mad scramble to remote work and utilize apps like Teams has been trying for most organizations over the past couple of years. With a rush to install and no time to plan, most team members did their best, prioritizing remote meetings as the primary concern. Therefore, as a result, Teams is vastly misunderstood and underutilized in most organizations. Join us in this session to go beyond the remote meetings aspect of Teams and to learn how to optimize efficiency, communication, and workflow with Teams.

This session will address the complex rules of retirement distributions, review key provisions of the SECURE Act 2.0, and provide practical strategies of maximizing tax benefits for your client. **Please Note:  If you need credit reported to the IRS for this IRS approved program, please download the IRS CE request form on the Course Materials Tab and submit to kori.herrera@acpen.com.

We all know that Fraud Happens. But, why? Why do people we think we can trust let us down? This session will explore the minds of white-collar criminals and examine some recent high-profile fraud cases. Why did they do it? How did they do it? What were the warning signs? If you think that fraud cannot happen to your organization, this session might give you pause.

Technology has given us many new writing tools, but they may just allow an inexperienced novice to turn out poor communications more quickly.  Whatever your expertise level, this webinar will help you take your writing skills to another level, saving your time and making it far more likely your reader will read and understand your message.  

Form 1041 is considered a complicated return by many practitioners, and the complexities have increased with legislation enacted in 2012 and 2017. This stems from the fact that there is terminology specific only to fiduciary entities, special accounting rules that fall somewhere between book and tax, and odd calculations such as ?distributable net income? and ?deductible DNI.? In this series of webcasts and through a series of schematics and spreadsheets, some of the mystery will be removed from the workings of fiduciary taxation and be replaced with an understanding of the structure and consistency that underlies this interesting little entity that has been around since the Crusades and has a long history of use and effectiveness. Be sure to register for all courses in this series: Fiduciary Taxation Part 1: Introduction to Form 1041 Fiduciary Taxation Part 2: Fiduciary Accounting & Simple Trusts Fiduciary Taxation Part 3: Complex Trusts & Charitable Deduction Fiduciary Taxation Part 4: Miscellaneous Topics & AMT

Financial statement forecasting is essential for predicting a company's future financial health, guiding strategic decisions, and attracting investments. By analyzing historical data, market trends, and assumptions, businesses can anticipate risks and opportunities, enabling effective planning, resource allocation, and long-term stability and growth. - Forecasting Process: This involves projecting future income, expenses, and resources. By leveraging historical data and market insights, businesses can predict financial health, shaping strategic planning, investment decisions, and risk management. - Forecasting Profitability: Predicting future earnings informs strategic decisions, investment planning, and resource allocation. It facilitates effective budgeting, cash flow management, risk assessment, and enhances attractiveness to investors for sustainable growth. - Forecasting the Balance Sheet: Analysts forecast to predict a company's future financial position, assessing growth potential, solvency, and capital structure. This informs investment decisions, strategic planning, and risk management, ensuring financial stability and growth. Join our webinar to explore these concepts with a practical example, guiding you through the forecasting process and demonstrating its practical applications in real-world scenarios. This event may be a rebroadcast of a live event and the instructor will be available to answer your questions during the event.

Managing and auditing employee spending on personal and corporate credit cards is a challenge everywhere. Legacy manual expense reporting preparation and approval processes are tedious and repetitive and are an excellent place to start your company's use of business process automation solutions. This session will cover a variety of expense workflow tools which use technologies and features like bank feeds, mobile receipt capture, OCR data extraction/filling, automated policy enforcement, and artificial intelligence-based validation to automate and eliminate the tedium. Attend this session and learn how to use automation and cure the expense reporting blues for you and your employees.

Governmental and not-for-profit organizations are entrusted with funds from taxpayers and donors and are frequently targeted by fraud perpetrators. How can these organizations ensure those funds are used only for intended purposes? This course will provide several real-world case studies in which a governmental or not-for-profit entity was the victim of fraud, including what type of fraud (asset misappropriation, fraudulent financial reporting, or corruption), how it happened, the fraud indicators that were present, and what could have been done to prevent the fraud.

External auditors only detect 3-5% of all fraud incidences. Get pragmatic guidance on detecting fraud. Discuss where fraud is most likely to occur. Learn to conduct inquiries and direct the audit in the areas of greatest concern, those most likely to be abused by perpetrators.

Enterprise Risk Management for SMEs

Embezzlement happens often to many small businesses. Unfortunately, the lack of internal controls allow the embezzlement to remain undetected for years. But when it is discovered, the small business owner will most likely contact their CPA for advice. What should you do when your client contacts you about their employee embezzling money from their business? What options should you present to your client? How can your client protect themselves, while investigating the embezzlement? What steps need to be taken about preserving any documents, emails, texts, or phone calls? This course teaches how to engage the client, properly identify the evidence needed to prove the crime, how to write the report for civil and criminal trial, and best practices in preserving electronic and paper evidence. This event may be a rebroadcast of a live event and the instructor will be available to answer your questions during the event.

Passive Activity Loss (PAL) rules have never been more critical in Federal tax reporting. This course provides a comprehensive and complete review of the laws and regulations impacting PALs, including the rules governing rental real estate, grouping and the 3.8% net investment income tax. Learn what qualifies as a passive activity and the rules governing its application by exploring several recent court cases and the existing regulations to know how the IRS views this critical area of the tax law. The IRS is actively auditing the failure to report passive losses properly. You and your clients can?t afford to be left behind.

Until recently, a percentage of organizations discounted the risk related to external fraud attempts. Most were only concerned with protecting physical assets such as inventory or fixed assets. However, because of the many highly publicized corporate hacking events, such as the ones that affected the Colonial Pipeline and JBS Meats, more attention is being paid to external fraud risk of all types. In this session, we look at what is included in a definition of external fraud and then delve into specific control issues that can give rise to increased risk. We then discuss measures that organizations can employ to help reduce exposure to external attacks. This event may be a rebroadcast of a live event and the instructor will be available to answer your questions during the event.

Security and privacy issues must be top-of-mind concerns for business professionals using AI. Yet, for far too many of these K2’s AI – Security And Privacy Issues professionals, no concern is given for the potential security and privacy risks associated with AI, setting the stage for potentially disastrous results! In this session, you will learn about AI security and privacy risks and how to manage them. This session includes discussions of the major AI companies’ security and privacy policies, how AI platforms might use your data, and how you can stay in control. Given how quickly AI is spreading, this is one session you simply cannot afford to miss.

Anytime someone says "I want," "I need," or "Will you," you are in a negotiation.  For decades, the negotiation techniques described in Getting to Yes by Fisher and Ury of the Harvard Negotiations Project were the world's standard negotiation methods.  These techniques involved collaborative methods for discovering how to make the "pie" bigger and then split it.  More recent research on human psychology has revealed new methods that will allow you to do even better.  Sometimes, you can't settle for getting half of what you want.  Sometimes you have to have it all.  This session explores negotiating's human side, to give you powerful people skills that will help you get more.