In the accounting and financial services industry, the expectation to do more with less has become the norm.
With much of professional services firm’s past optimization efforts focused on improving the delivery side of the business, many organizations are now turning their focus to rethinking how they operate in other areas of the business. Nowhere is that truer than in the Learning & Development (L&D) department.
The increasing pressure on L&D to more swiftly design content for remote delivery methods, and the increasing complexity of tracking the CPE compliance of professionals within firms, have both surged. The industry as a whole is now under tighter oversight and monitoring, ensuring that professionals not only meet Continuing Education (CE) requirements, but also embody the standards of professionalism that their roles demand. For L&D professionals, this presents an opportune moment to reassess processes for content development, deployment, and CE credit tracking.
A Critical Need for Effective Tools and Processes
For L&D professionals, now is the time to focus on implementing workflow solutions and processes that deliver measurable impact to the organization, such as:
- Automating processes to improve resource efficiency
- Tracking, validating, and systemically auditing processes
- Issuing CE credits promptly and accurately
Many L&D teams within accounting firms have become adept at utilizing existing tools such as Google Docs, Smartsheets, and shared email boxes to gather content data, documentation, signoffs, and regulatory requirements, even before a course is loaded into the Learning Management System (LMS) for registration. They’ve also used these tools to manage feedback from stakeholders and content owners, creating repositories to store and manage related documentation throughout the content’s lifecycle.
These workaround and make-shift legacy solutions, though creative, are often piecemeal and only partially effective. They often come with significant limitations, particularly when it comes to storage capacity, workflow capabilities, and the need for IT department involvement for setup and configuration. For organizations that maintain a National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) registry ID, adhering to specific guidelines and responsibilities for content design and deployment is crucial. The most recently updated NASBA guidelines, effective January 2024, such as S16-05 for attendance monitoring and S-24 for tracking qualifications, emphasize the need for a repeatable, scalable process with clear handoffs and audit trails. Regulators are increasingly scrutinizing firms to ensure compliance with these standards.
One Size Fits All? Hardly Ever.
Accounting firms facing these challenges may assume the answer lies in their learning management system (LMS). But SaaS LMS solutions cannot (and have not to this point) been able to address the issue alone. Why is that?
The LMS landscape is continuously evolving as vendors are acquired and platforms strive to integrate the most relevant features for corporate training and professional development. These platforms are built, managed, and maintained to cater to the foundational needs of businesses across a wide variety of industry verticals.
This approach makes sense for the LMS vendor, but unfortunately, makes it nearly impossible to find a single learning platform that does everything an accounting or financial services firm requires to meet the complex and diverse needs of stakeholders from L&D, compliance, and IT. So often, the LMS that is selected meets the general requirements for an LMS but leaves the compliance team at risk for managing their requirements correctly, with a system that lacks the native rules and workflows necessary to manage specific NASBA requirements.
You may ask, what about compliance-focused LMS vendors? While there are a few systems that cater to the needs of the compliance world, many are still working to add native learning and talent modules. Additionally, many companies who implement a learning management system focused on compliance end up also implementing a separate (additional!) platform for compliance training. This introduces challenges such as syncing completion records back to the corporate LMS, leading to additional IT projects, data corruption risks, and user frustration. Lastly, compliance focused LMS providers are niche. Given the regularity of M&A in the LMS industry, it is important that the processes supporting CPE compliance management are independent of a chosen LMS. This gives a firm the ability to scale up to enterprise solutions as the firm grows or change LMS providers as market dynamics shift.
The Happy Medium
So where does that leave us? Compliance management, especially the rigorous rules around NASBA CPE, do not leave room for interruption or a delay in enforcement. The fines are simply too large for both the individual CPAs and the professional services firms. And all-in-one solutions are just not cutting it.
That is why Educe developed Calculo. Calculo is a tool focused solely on CPE compliance management for administrators and learners, that works seamlessly with any LMS an organization has in place (or plans to migrate to in the future). Educe’s experience and expertise providing LMS implementation services has uniquely positioned us to understand the larger learning and talent landscape, and this was a key factor in our decision to create a focused and sustainable solution to address the gap in the market. Also, we have partnered with some of the largest professional services firms and NASBA to integrate with the NASBA Rules Engine Service (RES). The RES integration provides a unique ability for firms to manage state-by-state jurisdictional compliance for their professionals with real time updates directly managed by the oversight body. This unique integration ensures the Calculo platform continues to adapt and meet the specific needs of accounting and financial services firms and individual CPAs.
The results speak for themselves. Our Calculo customers average millions of course completions annually, with significant interaction directly to systems like the NASBA Rules Engine Service, to manage and process state-specific CPE requirements. These state rules for CPE evolve constantly, sometimes as frequently as weekly, as states adjust their post-COVID regulations. Keeping in sync with the evolving state guidelines and eligibility for CPE tracking is critical to keeping CPA professionals up to date with CE compliance. Calculo customers have been able to do this efficiently and effectively.
Executing with Precision
Considering the challenges existing LMS solutions present for accounting and financial services firms, it is essential for L&D professionals to move beyond cobbled-together legacy systems. Instead, it is most prudent to implement solutions that not only meet current demands but also provide scalability and efficiency for the future. By investing in the right tools and processes, L&D and compliance professionals can ensure that their organizations remain compliant, efficient, and capable of meeting the increasing demands of the business.
The time to act is now—reach out to learn more about how Calculo can enhance your L&D processes and help you build a stronger, more resilient future for your organization.
