Professional Development and Event Catalog

Implementing ASU No. 2016-02, Leases (Topic 842) is sure to have a major impact on your balance sheet and potentially on your business as well. This course is a one-stop shop for what you need to know about the now-effective changes to the lease accounting guidance. In this course, we will review how to measure the lease liability and right-of-use asset that will now be recorded on the balance sheet for all leases. We will also tackle the tricky issues of accounting for lease modifications and other lease remeasurement events as well as address the other major provisions of ASC 842, such as disclosures and transition. We will also review the income statement treatment of lease expense for all leases for both lessees and lessors and discuss recent FASB implementation guidance. Lastly, the course will cover all recent updates to the originally issued guidance in Topic 842, including that related to discount rates. With Topic 842's effective date here, now is the time to get up to speed on this complex new standard.

Excel is the accountant’s tool of choice for analyzing and reporting financial data, yet many use time-consuming and error-prone processes to complete everyday tasks. Regardless of your level of experience, if you use Excel, you need this course to learn more efficient and effective ways to work with Excel. In this course, you will discover countless tips, tricks, and techniques to improve your general level of productivity, reduce the amount of time you spend on mundane tasks, such as formatting, and customize Excel for greater accuracy and efficiency. You will also learn valuable formula-building skills, best practices for linking Excel data from other worksheets and workbooks, and how to streamline report generation and printing processes. Your K2 instructor will reinforce key learning points throughout the program with practical, real-world examples that will improve your understanding and comprehension of the topics presented. This highly acclaimed course draws on over twenty-five years of experience in delivering spreadsheet training to accounting and financial professionals, which assures you of the relevance and usefulness of the information and guidance provided during the program.

How do you raise your skills to the next level to master the Controller or CFO role?  Welcome to a course that provides insights that align the CGMA Competency Framework. The course will examine each of the areas: Technical, Business, Leadership and People to increase your competency.  How are your technical skills?  Are you a traditional accountant or have you learned to expand your technical skills to go beyond “what are the financial numbers?” to “why did these financial results occur?”  Are you able to use ratios to understand the business dynamics and the implications to change course or take corrective action?  Are the systems that you implement and operate best practices or merely stop-gap solutions? How are your business skills?  Can you set a vision? Can you develop a strategy?  Do you understand the macroeconomic environment of your organization?   Can you lead a major project to a successful conclusion?  This session will explore the role of business as opposed to tracking the results of the business. How are your people skills?  How good is your ability to influence others? How are successful are your negotiation skills?   How well can you communicate?  Are you a collaborator or a partner?  This section will help accountants understand that it is people skills that drive the overall success of the accounting operations. Finally, how are your Leadership skills?  Do you inspire staff or make them angry?  Do you know why your staff work for your company and you?  Do you understand what employees want from their position?  Do you know how to deal with a difficult staff person?  Can you lead difficult change?  This session will help you recognize what leadership truly is as opposed to what passes for day to day management.

You have used Excel for years and perhaps Lotus 123 before that. And through all that time, you have repeatedly said, “One day, I’ll learn how to write macros.” Finally, that time has arrived because this four-hour program will introduce you to the wide world of Excel macros and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). This course teaches the fundamentals of creating and working with macros in Excel and is designed specifically for those with little experience working with macros. More specifically, taking this course will teach you how to use Excel’s Macro Recorder to write simple yet effective macros. You will also learn how to secure and share macros with other Excel users and create user-defined functions to solve specific accountant-centric problems in Excel. Further, you will learn how to create macros that run when a user opens a workbook and VBA basics. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to learn how to begin working with macros – one of Excel’s most powerful tools.

Welcome to a course that makes the process of M&A easy to understand and easy to implement within your organization or your clients' organization. The course will provide an intensive overview of the M&A process. Focus will be on practical techniques to guide you through the M&A jungle and avoid the traps that have befallen many organizations.

Isn’t it time you learned how to take advantage of critical features available in your Microsoft 365/Office 365 subscription? In this session, you will learn to use tools such as Teams, Planner, Power Automate, and others to enhance productivity and efficiency.

With approximately 500 functions now available in Excel, some newer and more powerful tools are easy to overlook. But, if you do that, your productivity will suffer. In this session, you will learn how to take advantage of many of Excel’s more advanced features – some new and some legacy – to elevate your productivity to higher levels. In this session, you will learn about many of Excel’s newer tools, including XLOOKUP, SUMIFS, SWITCH, and STOCKHISTORY. Also included in this session are discussions of advanced financial functions, such as IPMT and PPMT, and how to retrieve summarized data easily using GETPIVOTDATA and CUBEVALUE. Additionally, you will learn how to make sophisticated calculations easier with Dynamic Array formulas, harness the AGGREGATE function's power, and create more accurate forecasts with Excel’s FORECAST.ETS function. No matter your experience working with Excel, participating in this course will help you work more efficiently and effectively in Excel.

Please note: this class is designed for peer reviewers. Firms subject to peer review may benefit from learning about the program.

This seminar updates participants on FASB and AICPA standards. It includes full coverage and discussions of all new FASB, SAS, SSARS, SSAE, and other standards

Social media has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in our business world. However, just because it exists is not a good reason to use it. This workshop is designed to give you an overview of the social media landscape to help you decide if you want to engage with and on social media and, if so, what channel(s) are most strategic for you and your business. The workshop ends with a simple framework to help you use social media as a credibility strategy for your business, giving you a strategy for creating a year's worth of social media content in a single day.

Many people, when they hear about feedbcak in organizations and the workplace, think immediately of performance reviews. But feedback should not be isolated to these formal structures. This workshop is about the more informal methods of feedback that managers and coworkers can use to have more productive conversations that drive behavioral change. Through understanding the importance of dialogue, strategic questions to drive conversation, and mistakes to avoid, you'll be able to have more productive feedback conversations in your workplace (and maybe even at home, too).

Unlike a traditional financial audit objective (Are the financial statements materially misstated), performance auditing can address a wide variety of objectives.  Is this program working? Can it be improved? Where can we save money? How can we operate more efficiently and effectively? Are management’s assertions supported? And so forth.  This session will explain what a performance audit is, describe the applicable standards, and provide examples that indicate the value of a performance audit.  Performance audits can add value to any entity and practitioners can profit from adding these assurance services to their practices.

This is a 2 hour webcast that will focus on the similarities between all three of these GASB accounting standards that deal with contractual arrangements such as leases, Subscription-Based Information Technology Arrangements (SBITA) and P3s.  Compare and contrast these standards as you prepare for implementation this year of GASB 94 and GASB 96, and review the implementation efforts of Leases in Year 2. 

Due to increasing scrutiny in the employee benefit plan area, it is imperative for auditors of 401(k) plans to remain up to date on the rules and regulations that may impact the audit engagement. In this course, auditors will enhance their knowledge by understanding the changes affecting audit procedures and reporting in accordance with recently issued Statements on Auditing Standards (SASs), identifying best practices, and performing efficient audit engagements.

Both businesses and individual clients face major changes as a result of new legislation, and tax professionals face the considerable challenge of delivering effective planning advice and services to address this myriad of recent developments. This course addresses this challenge and also encompasses the latest cases and rulings applicable to individual and business clients. Continually updated to reflect enacted legislation. Please Note: Due to content overlap, it is recommended that this course NOT be taken together with BIT4.

Recent economic, societal, and political changes have shown us the need for numerous projects and the need to manage those projects in a unique way. Project management is a way of thinking highly recognized and practiced by large organizations, but often neglected by the smallest companies and entrepreneurs. This course quickly discusses the basics of project management thought and practice and then spends the majority of the time exploring some of the greatest mistakes that can be made, the ways to avoid them, and some of the tricks that have been introduced into the discipline. In the program we will explore some of the specific types of project management as well as some of the available software programs to make the task of project management easier.

This course covers the foundational concepts of artificial intelligence (AI) and its relevance to accounting. Participants will explore various AI applications, including generative AI and prompt engineering, and understand the benefits, challenges, and future trends associated with AI integration in accounting.

In this comprehensive course, practitioners gain a deep understanding of strategic planning considerations and potential hurdles encountered when clients face difficult circumstances. Delving into an array of scenarios often classified as "challenging," the course offers tax insights. From divorce and personal bankruptcy to intricate personal relationship matters, participants will equip themselves to adeptly guide clients through these challenging scenarios by understanding the tax implications.

What exactly is cryptocurrency and its cousin named blockchain? Are they here to stay? This session will provide a big picture examination of the technologies and currencies by explaining how we got here. We discuss the systems and technical aspects of cryptocurrencies and blockchain. What is the broad view of the technologies that currently do, and will continue to, impact our workplace and lives?

Organizations that use primitive costing methods make predictable mistakes. They allocate too much cost to easy, high-volume "gravy" products and too little cost to difficult, low-volume "dog" products. This puts the organization with inferior information at a significant disadvantage against a competitor who has a better cost model. The secret to having a great cost model is learning how to deal with overhead. This webinar will show you how to assign 16 key categories of overhead. Whether you work in a wholesale, retail, health care, service or manufacturing business. This session will give you important insights into how to handle overhead. If you get your costing right, you will be able to give the "dogs" to your competitors and keep the "gravy" for yourself.