Educe held the second Calculo Advisory Panel on October 24, 2023, hosted by Kathleen Waid, Partner at Educe and Calculo General Manager, and Vicky Zoccali, Calculo Product Owner, with representation from leading firms in the accounting industry.
The main topics for the second session included upcoming regulatory changes that impact Calculo in the short-term as well as some of the priorities for the future product roadmap. More details from our discussion are highlighted below:
Upcoming Regulatory Changes
There are a number of regulatory changes that will affect US accounting firms within the next few months. The highlights are documented below.
- IRS CE Updates
- The IRS is instituting expiration for IRS CE Programs starting at the end of 2023. IRS CE Programs will expire on December 31, three years after IRS approval. If the program should remain eligible for IRS CE after that period, it will need to be renewed with the IRS and will have a new Program Number for each renewal. Program Numbers will be unique and cannot be re-used.
- Calculo will be updated to include additional fields and workflow to support these IRS changes including tracking Approval and Expiration Dates, associating IRS Program Numbers by course version, and new notifications.
- NASBA S05-01: Qualifications of Content Reviewers
- NASBA has updated S05-01 to remove the exception for content review of “lectures given only once.”
- Local Learning (One-Time Offerings) will be updated to include the same restriction as courses: the reviewer on an agenda module cannot also be the author on the module. When a user tries to add the same person, they will be presented with an error indicating that the author/reviewer is already present.
- NASBA S16-05: Group Live Allows Web-Enabled Two-Way Video
- What started as an exception during the COVID pandemic is now becoming an officially accepted delivery for Group Live sessions. This new standard defines that Group Live sessions can be delivered virtually as long as participation is monitored and documented, and there must be a certain number of attendance monitors based on the number of participants.
- The participant-to-attendance monitor ratio must not exceed 25:1, unless there is a dedicated attendance monitor in which case the participant-to-attendance monitor ratio must not exceed 100:1.
- Calculo will be updated to include new fields and validation to support these NASBA changes. Group Live classes will have an option to indicate that it is being delivered virtually and to add users as attendance monitors. If it is being delivered virtually, then the class will enforce the validation for the required number of attendance monitors in order to certify and award credit. Additionally, the Affidavit of Attendance form will be updated to exclude Group Live virtual classes.
Latest Release Updates
We highlighted some of the key items included in Release 3.5, which is Calculo’s next Production deployment on November 2, 2023.
- Blended Learning Delivery Method will be added as an option to External CPE Request submissions.
- Audit History improvements include more specific action descriptions and limiting the class agenda audit records to only user actions, leaving out system actions.
Future Roadmap
We took a look at some of the key items on the potential roadmap for Calculo, beyond the regulatory changes, which aim to address the top pain points of accounting firms in managing compliance, such as:
- Vended Content Service to better manage vended CPE courses
- Course expiration notifications
- Local Learning roster import error log
- Ability to restore a deleted Credit Qualified class agenda modules
- Adding the ability to remove an Instructor from all class agenda modules in a single action
- Additional improvements to audit history
- More actions logged
- Action categories
- Export function
The participants provided feedback regarding what they would like to see in the product and what would work best for their firm, which was very helpful and will inform some of our direction moving forward.
We thank all of the attendees for their active participation and input as we continue to seek ways to meet the needs of the industry. The next Calculo Advisory Panel is tentatively scheduled for May 21, 2024.
