With many Australian accountants being under restricted movements, the requirements for professional learning haven’t ceased.
At the same time, with social distancing rules in place across much of Australia, the bottom has fallen out of physical conferences, as well as the opportunity for many suppliers to get their services or products in front of Australian accountants.
Hence there is a lot more advertising, a lot more remote communication and a heck of a lot more emails – some accountants have said they’ve never had this volume of email communication in their life!
Many conference organisers are hoping to make the switch to virtual, though how this works remotely is yet to be seen. We’ve seen virtual drinks, virtual fireside chats, virtual campfires (byo virtual marshmallows). A lot of it isn’t working.
At the same time the suppliers are now marketing directly to customers, and not through the conferences. But we can safely conclude physical conferences aren’t going to be a thing this year.
Hence the need to look at online learning to keep up those CPE hours.
For Australian accountants who have tax qualifications, the Australian TPB site is brilliant. Not only is the information “straight from the source”, it’s also remarkably free, and according to the TPB their videos count towards the CPE requirements of the TPB. Brilliant.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCINtLG9eKaqjf5DNp7S1ofQ
As there is no proof of attendance, our tip in using this service when listening to the video is to take screen shots and make notes along the way. Keep a copy of these screen shots and notes for your CPE. The notes, and any additional research you do (like looking up legislation or current tax cases) are valuable to assist in proving the training was done. And, as a result of the training, if you implement additional procedures in your firm or communicate to staff by email, then keep a copy of this, including the emails sent as a result.
The TPB video normally includes a comment up front as to the time claimable for CPE through listening to the video, and any research or action you do outside the video is obviously not claimable as CPE.
The one silver lining is that without the commute and without the distractions, for those of us that can resist falling into the bottomless pit of social media, there seems to be more time to think, a quieter time, and the opportunity for some quality learning.
If, while you are catching up or getting ahead on your online CPE, you need assistance with your ad-hoc compliance work, then please reach out to Odyssey and we’ll be glad to assist.
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