I completed my accountancy degree 8 years ago but never managed to get into the profession. For the last 8 years i have worked in non-accounting roles & so forgot practically everything i had learnt. After coming across my old university folders in a storage box recently, i have decided to give it another shot. Bearing in mind that i have forgotten most of the work, what would be the best way to go about this?
Have the accounting standards changed dramatically in the last eight years or is it not important to know them for bookkeeping purposes?
Would doing the Sage bookkeeping e-learning courses, followed by the Sage 50 Accounts e-learning courses be suitable to get up to speed with things or would it be better to do an ICB or IAB course instead?
Looking through my old folders i am pretty sure i could get through the Sage bookkeeping course quickly but how useful would doing the Sage 50 accounts course be?
Also how useful would doing an Excel course be?
-- Edited by Khaleel on Monday 19th of May 2014 02:08:42 PM
I completed my accountancy degree 8 years ago but never managed to get into the profession. For the last 8 years i have worked in non-accounting roles & so forgot practically everything i had learnt.
You will probably be surprised at how easily it comes back when you give your memory a prod.
After coming across my old university folders in a storage box recently, i have decided to give it another shot. Bearing in mind that i have forgotten most of the work, what would be the best way to go about this?
Personally I would suggest a fresh book rather than one that you have already studied. Last thing that you want is to start getting bored by having done all of the questions once before.
A good book to get you back up to speed in bookkeeping and basic accountancy is this one :
Once you have done that log onto the ACCA site and do the pilot paper for paper F3 which is bookkeeping and basic accountancy.
You might also want to have a go at F2 as well which is basic Management Accounting
Have the accounting standards changed dramatically in the last eight years
Yes. There is a convergeance between UK GAAP and IFRS. A lot of change happened between 2006 and 2009 with many of the old standards that you will remember having now been taken out of service or replaced.
FRS100, 101 and 102 are set to completely rewrite UK GAAP basically to a more or less carbon copy of the IFRS over the next few months.
or is it not important to know them for bookkeeping purposes?
Many of the questions asked on here are because many people do not read the accounting standards.
Would doing the Sage bookkeeping e-learning courses, followed by the Sage 50 Accounts e-learning courses be suitable to get up to speed with things
If you wanted to use Sage. Bookkeeping and Sage are not synonumous. Its just one of many software packages available.
or would it be better to do an ICB or IAB course instead?
At some stage if you set up as a bookkeeper you will need to get cover for MLR and gain access to networkng opportunities. Both of those two have merits as does AAT or CIMA. (I'm missing ACCA out there as regulation 8 would put real restictions on what you can do as a bookkeeper).
If you have it in your mind that you may want the option of permanent employment then write off IAB and ICB.
If it's purely self employment then any of those would be suitable.
Looking through my old folders i am pretty sure i could get through the Sage bookkeeping course quickly but how useful would doing the Sage 50 accounts course be?
I don't use Sage so cannot comment on that one.
Also how useful would doing an Excel course be?
Personally I always have Excel open on one of my screens as a scratch pad area.
I'm an advanced Excel user and can say categorigally that many of the people out there teaching Excel should not be. Your best bet to get on top of Excel is to sign up for th YouTube channel "Excel is fun".
Do not assume from the name that its a Peter and Jane do Excel. They guy creating the videos (well over 2000 of them now) conveys very complex things in freindly, interesting yet simple terms.
I do not think that anyone can work properly in this business without knowing Excel.... But I wouldn't pay for a course in it when the bes that there is is available for free.
Hi Khaleel,
I thought that the best approach to ensure that I covered everything was to embed my answers in your question.
Hope that some of it helps.
Kind regards,
Shaun.
p.s. amended only because the link to Amazon didn't work for some reason.
-- Edited by Shamus on Monday 19th of May 2014 02:23:22 PM
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I was a Sage user and reseller for about 15 years, and sold and supported it to quite a few regular clients. I gave it up 10 years ago when Sage was getting too expensive. A few days ago I started learning VT Transaction +, and won't be going back to Sage! VT is cheap and so far I'm pretty impressed. I've got 60 days of free use before I decide to buy, and will hopefully find a few clients to try it out on before then! Download a copy and see how you get on teaching yourself. Then consider Sage and courses if it doesn't suit you.
OpenOffice or LibreOffice are free, and are compatible with Excel!
Now we seem to have a steadily growing contingent of VT user on here.
Only downside that I've found to it is that it doesn't have stock control built in so for box stacker and shifter type businesses the likes of Quickbooks and Sage win out.
For service type industries though I just don't see why anyone would use up any of their Sage licence client quota as it has to be cheaper to run VT alongside Sage (or focus on service industry type of clients and only run VT).
I love that VT expects those who use it to be bookkeepers or accountants where other offerings in the market (we both know who I'm talking about) seem to spend so much effort making their software idiot proof that they actually affect its usability with those who do know what they're doing.
Good luck using VT. The more that you use it the more that you'll grow to love it.
All the best,
Shaun.
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
Use up their Sage licence quota? I've got an unlimited company, unlimited network users licence! The only catch is that I have version 8, but it's fine for any clients who won't want to run their own system. I bet upgrading would be an absolutely mind boggling price!
Sage stock control was OK, but not brilliant, and I hated Job Costing, which is one of the reasons I changed to Quickbooks when I needed to do it for my own company!
It was the very last section on the very last page of the VT manual that convinced me, even though at the time I was going through the totally confused and will never get my head round it phase of trying to use it. That's the bit that says that programmers can have full read/write access to the data files! So I persevered, and within a couple of days had got the hang of it. I'm redoing my accounts for last year in it at the moment, and the only important bit that won't help me with is dealing with VAT.
I like the fact that VT is cheap, or free if you only need a cash book, so clients could use it, although as you say Shaun, it's more of an accountant's program, so maybe a bit more challenging for someone without accounts experience. But it's easy to correct errors, so they could stick in Dropbox or something for me to fix.
As I'm just starting out (although I have 30 years experience, including 15 in the previous incarnation of this business), and don't have any clients yet, I think VT is a great place to start. If it turns out that I need something different in my first 60 days, it won't have cost anything, and after that I won't lose much if I dump it.
As someone who would look for employment rather than starting on my own, would learning Sage not be more useful to me? In virtually all the jobs i've seen advertised they request experience of Sage. Correct me if i'm wrong but i think i read that it is the most widely used accounting program in the UK
-- Edited by Khaleel on Monday 19th of May 2014 08:06:52 PM
You mentioned ICB / IAB so the assumption was that you would be going self employed as those qualifications are not much use for finding employment.
Sage is a very widely used bit of software and its certainly the one with the most training courses available.
Before you decide what you want to learn you need to decide what your target market is.
Larger employers are more likely to take on accounts assistants in temp / temp to perm type roles and that market is dominated by SAP.
You won't be able to learn SAP before going and working with one of these companies but when you do it's much more user freindly than Sage is.
Practice like Sage and IRIS.
Clients are encouraged to adopt the same software as that used by the practice. For the clients that would be the Sage part, IRIS being accounts production software.
For Self employed bookkeepers and smaller accountants many clients will be Micro businesses well below VAT registration threshold. Many of these clients use Sage but often don't really need it (they just went down that path either because the bank told them to or thought that it was the software that they were supposed to use). I often move those clients from Sage to VT.
Intuit (Quickbooks) in real terms is much bigger than Sage and a couple of years back cranked up its interest in the UK as it already dominated the US market. The number of quickbooks users out there is growing.
As you are looking for employment do not underestimate the amount of competition in the market place for bookkeeper / accounts assistant type roles.
You may find that unless at a minimum you are able to show AAT level IV qualification or equivalent experience over at least three year you will not even get to interview.
That said, some areas of the country are easier than others. The above statement should be considered in relation to the bit of the country between Watford Gap and the Scottish Border. If you are lucky enough to live in or around London then things are somewhat different.
If you want to see what the competition is like for your area simply log onto the Reed website, put in the job title you are interested in, and look at the number of applicants for the role.
Actually Reed have recently changed things to say 100+ as I think that cases like the Accounts Assistant in Wolverhampton getting over 900 applicants inside two hours of being first posted may put people off entering this profession.
__________________
Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
