CPA course requirement questions...
Good morning everyone,
I am currently a senior in my Economics undergrad at UC Davis. I will be graduating either Spring 2017 or Dec 2017 (internship or job offer pending.) I feel it would be beneficial to my career to pursue a CPA, as I do enjoy accounting in general, and will make me more competitive (goal is a big four).
Right now I'm trying to plan out my strategy for completing my required courses. Here is a list of queries:
1. Does it matter where I complete the required courses? Obviously it must be accredited. But would it be worth completing the courses through my previous community college (Chabot) or go through UC Davis Extension (the CPA Exam Track Certification Program). The community college would be cheaper, but education value the UC Davis Extension may be better.
2. Does my BA in Economics satisfy the 24 semester units of business related subjects?
3. For the 20 semester units in accounting study and 10 semester units in ethics study, I am a bit confused exactly what the requirement is saying. Do the courses I take to complete the Accounting Subjects and Business Related Subjects count for these sections?
Any clarification and advice would be greatly appreciated. I do plan to take a CPA review course before I begin my testing. Probably the Wiley CPAexcel.
Thank you, I appreciate your time and effort.
1) Save the money and take the community college courses. I've never heard from anyone that they felt these "Credential Focused" tracks were any more beneficial than the core curriculum.
2) Not familiar with CA CPA rules, but it should.
3) Yes, but you need to ensure you also take Business Ethics and BLaw classes. Audit classes can also meet the ethics portion of these credits.
Use Becker, its more expensive but worth it.
my wife is a CPA- as long as you have the cert no one cares where the classes come from.
Becker is the "gold standard" in the Big 4 world. It is quite expensive, so my advice is to try and land a job in Big 4 before beginning the CPA review so that the firm pays for your materials. However, be warned that they will probably focus recent college grad recruiting on audit, tax, or IT audit, so you may get stuck doing something that isn't your top interest.
It does not matter where you complete required courses. My strategy (once I figured out that I would be pursuing CPA post graduation) was to max-out my credit hours each semester to get the maximum credits I possibly could from my university, which got me to 144 total (had an AP credit from high school). Then I took two online courses for the remaining 6 credit hours. Both courses I took online were finance-related, but that is not a requirement. As long as you satisfy the accounting, business, ethics requirements your other credits can be in anything. I would recommend taking your core accounting/business classes at UC Davis and then getting the remaining credits from your old CC, which is a less expensive option. A lot of people go into a Masters of Accounting/Finance program to finish the required coursework, but that is expensive at Big 4 won't hire you at a higher level just because of your MA/MS.
Your BA in Economics will probably satisfy the business coursework, but you should go through your transcript course-by-course to make sure you have enough credits.
Another thing to think about is which jurisdiction you will complete the exam in because the requirements in CA may be different from other states, and some other states might have easier requirements especially for the Ethics piece. For example, I live/work in Texas but went to school in MI. In TX there is some ethics course and accounting research requirement, which my coursework did not satisfy because the core curriculum/degree structure differs in MI due to not having the same requirements for licensure. As part of my firm's policy you must be licensed in the state in which your home office resides (TX). So I registered and sat for the MI exam, got my MI license, then applied for a reciprocal license in TX and only had to take a 4-hour ethics online learning and a 25-question ethics exam (open-book multiple choice). So you can see there could be some benefit to applying to the exam in another state. Keep in mind that state boards can change regulations any time though.
Becker has some good summaries of each state's requirements at the following link: http://www.becker.com/cpa-review/resources/about-exam/requirements/cali…
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