CPE & Event Calendar

How well do you understand your organization’s cash flow? Good cash management techniques can provide a competitive advantage! This session shows you how to effectively measure and manage your cash conversion cycle. With a more complete understanding of how cash flows through your organization, you can eliminate impediments. Better cash management lowers your borrowing costs, reduces financing needs, and creates financial flexibility in your organization.

MassCPAs is excited to bring back our Management of an Accounting Practice (MAP) Conference in-person this fall! Join us November 21st-23rd at Foxwoods Resort Casino for three days of networking, reconnecting with your peers and informative sessions on the top issues facing firms. Developed by firm leaders for firm leaders and their successors, this conference will feature some of accounting's foremost thought leaders.

Serving on a nonprofit board can be exciting and fulfilling. However, unique FASB standards for nonprofits can make reading financial statements a frustrating task. Learn about accounting errors and risk management. Being a board member can also lead to personal liability if the organization's policies and procedures are not set up properly and monitored effectively. Examine the core principles and practices of nonprofit accounting and what questions to ask your organization to protect leadership.

This interactive, two-hour seminar will address how to make the most of the vital time immediately following your promotion into management. This includes how to quickly engage your learning curve, getting to know your boss and their expectations, building rapport with your team and the importance of securing initial small wins. Note: There is a minimum passing rate of 70% for this course. The webcast was originally broadcast on August 8, 2015.

Risk oversight by the board of directors is a key component of a firm's enterprise risk management framework, and recently, boards have paid more attention to their firm's tax-planning activities. In this study, we use a hand-collected sample of proxy statement disclosures about the board's role in risk oversight and provide evidence that risk oversight is negatively associated with both tax uncertainty and overall tax burdens. We find that risk oversight is most strongly associated with positions that yield permanent tax benefits and also with less risky tax-planning activities. Overall, the evidence suggests that board risk oversight is associated with more effective tax-planning practices.

No team or organization is perfect, and we all experience conflict in our professional lives. How we manage conflict determines whether or not it ultimately helps our hurts our work. Learn how to tackle conflict positively by understanding sources of conflict, the damaging effects of unchecked negative conflict, how to react when conflict is directed at you, how to mediate when others experience conflict and how to create needed positive conflict. The webcast was originally broadcast on July 18, 2016. Note: There is a minimum passing rate of 70% for this course.

Your clients depend on you more than ever to help them reduce risk and position themselves for financial success in the future. This course is to help keep you on top of recent developments, including how the new tax laws impact financial planning, tax management within investments and client communications by c reating Trusted Planning Relationships.

In this course, we'll dive into the world of analytics, equipping you with the skills to assess your clients' analytics maturity and leverage techniques for accurate forecasting. You'll also learn how to spot opportunities where optimization techniques can enhance financial decision-making. We'll cover the essentials, from understanding analytics fundamentals to exploring descriptive analytics methods like text mining, multidimensional clustering and statistical outlier detection. This course is part of a training series that introduces CPAs and financial professionals to descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, covering analytics benchmarking, forecasting methods and optimization for decision-making in capital investment and inventory management.

In this course, you will gain the skills to assess the analytics maturity of client organizations, effectively utilize analytics techniques for forecasting, and identify opportunities for optimization in financial decision-making. We will explore the fundamentals of forecasting, including statistical methods for making and evaluating forecasts. Through practical examples, you will learn how to forecast staffing needs for an office, predict product revenue in complex time series, and employ CART trees for market segmentation when dealing with nonlinear targets. This course is part of a training series that introduces CPAs and financial professionals to descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, covering analytics benchmarking, forecasting methods, and optimization for decision-making in capital investment and inventory management.

In this course, you will develop the skills to assess the analytics maturity of client organizations, effectively utilize analytics techniques for forecasting, and identify opportunities for optimizing financial decision-making. We will delve into the concept of optimization, covering the setup and solving of optimization problems. You will also learn how to optimize capital investment decisions using decision trees and enhance inventory management by implementing reorder points and safety stock. ? This course is part of a training series that introduces CPAs and financial professionals to descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics, covering analytics benchmarking, forecasting methods, and optimization for decision-making in capital investment and inventory management.

We all have 24 hours to work with each day-but only a minority truly know how to maximize the use of time. Join us and learn how to prioritize work, strategically leverage other people, know when to work on what, protect your time, manage access to you and how to say no. The webcast was originally broadcast on May 13, 2016. Note: There is a minimum passing rate of 70% for this course.

As work demands increase, so does work-related stress. Understanding how stress is created and how to manage it effectively is the key to maximizing your productivity on the job. Learn about the nature of stress, its effects on your health and work and what to do about it. Several practical techniques will be shared to help enable you to keep stress in check and under control. The webcast was originally broadcast on October 27, 2016. Note: There is a minimum passing rate of 70% for this course.

This course will introduce the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board's framework and the FSA (Fundamentals of Sustainability Accounting) credential and its relevance to management and financial services industries. The course will discuss the relevance of reporting and monitoring SASB metrics for private companies to manage risk, improve operational results and increase enterprise value.

Acknowledging the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) challenges that exist in society and within the corporate sector, IMA (Institute of Management Accountants), the California Society of Certified Public Accountants (CalCPA), and the International Federation of Accountants(IFAC) began a journey to empirically assess the state of DE&I within the global accounting profession.

With recent high-profile cybersecurity breaches and increased practitioner and regulatory attention, organizations are under pressure to consider the accounting implications of these attacks and develop appropriate responses. Specifically, cybersecurity events may affect organizations' operations, financial and non-financial performance, and ultimately its stakeholders. To address how cybersecurity issues may affect accounting, this paper presents an Event, Impact, Response Framework to discuss current research and consider implications for both practitioners and researchers. The Framework highlights how practitioners may rely on research findings to better assess cybersecurity threats, understand their impact, and develop response strategies. Results encourage additional research examining how (1) organizations identify cybersecurity threats, incidents, and breaches, (2) cybersecurity affects different risks, and (3) management responses to cybersecurity risks and events. The Framework also suggests the need for cybersecurity research to extend beyond the Accounting Information Systems (AIS) community to areas such as financial accounting, managerial accounting, and auditing.

Not-for-profit organizations are one of the fastest-growing sectors of our economy, making it increasingly important that auditors, attorneys, CFOs and other advisers understand the unique accounting principles and challenges that apply. Examine the core principles and practices of not-for-profit accounting; review the general characteristics and operational environment of not-for-profit organizations; and discuss how to apply generally accepted standards and principles. Also, learn risk management best practices and common accounting errors.

Your clients depend on you more than ever to help them reduce risk and position themselves for financial success in the future. This course will help keep you on top of recent developments, including how the new tax laws impact financial planning, tax management and ways to help plan for long-term care.

Robotic process automation (RPA) provides organizations numerous benefits in achieving efficiency and effectiveness, but not without risks. Without proper management, the risks posed by RPA may outweigh its intended advantages. RPA risk management has received little attention in prior accounting research and practice. We'll discuss risks and control considerations important to achieving the return on RPA investment and maintaining the integrity of the automated processes, substantiated by interviews with RPA and risk professionals. Our interviewees suggest that RPA risk management provides incremental value in addition to risk management of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, that the skillset needed for RPA risk management may be missing among risk professionals, and that existing risk and control frameworks must evolve for RPA risk management.

This study uses difference-in-differences (DiD) analyses to examine the consequences of adopting the U.S. critical audit matter (CAM) disclosure requirement for preparers and users of financial reports. The CAM requirement is one of the largest expansions of the U.S. audit report since the 1940s. We document significant changes to financial statement footnotes referenced by CAMs, which suggests an indirect consequence where management disclosure changes in areas that are expected to be scrutinized following auditor-provided disclosure. Results also suggest that, on average, CAM disclosures do not provide incremental information to the market. To further examine market reaction, we develop well-specified prediction models for the expected number and subject areas of CAMs. We find limited initial evidence that the market reacts negatively when unexpected CAMs are disclosed. Overall, the findings provide insights on the new CAM standard and particularly demonstrate its relevance to management disclosure decisions and to the market.

Develop a framework of "effective" time management. Identify the three time factors: time wasters or stealers, time savers and time management techniques. Highlight concepts that distinguish the relationship of time management and behavioral science versus traditional time management tools or gimmicks. Also, explore the need for managing oneself in order to improve the management of time. The webcast was originally broadcast on May 4, 2017. Note: There is a minimum passing rate of 70% for this course.