The December CPE scramble is not a discipline problem. It is a planning problem, and it produces the same two bad outcomes every year: hours taken because they were available rather than because they were useful, and a state-specific requirement discovered too late to satisfy properly.

Summer fixes both, for a reason that has nothing to do with virtue. You have capacity in July that you will not have in December, and the courses worth taking — the ...

Every vendor in this category demonstrates well. That is what the demonstration is for.

Which means a buying decision made from demonstrations selects for demonstration quality, not for the thing you are actually buying — and the two are unrelated. What follows is the discipline that separates them, in the order it should be applied.

Before You Look at Anything

Three questions to answer internally. A firm that cannot answer them will buy something

Reciprocity is the one multi-state payroll rule that clients think is automatic. It is not, and the gap between what it does and what employers assume it does causes most of the errors in this area.

Three sentences to get right at the outset:

It applies only between specific state pairs that have agreed to it. Not generally, not by default.

It requires a certificate from the employee. Without one on file, the employer withholds ...

Most mid-year reforecasts are unreliable for one structural reason, and it is not a modelling problem.

The forecast and the budget are being treated as the same document.

A budget is a commitment — a target, tied to accountability and frequently to compensation. A forecast is a prediction — the best available estimate of what will actually happen.

Once those merge, the forecast becomes a negotiation. Nobody submits a ...

The question clients ask about a scheduled expiration is "what should I do." The honest answer usually begins with what not to do, and it is more valuable than a prediction.

Because the central feature of a scheduled sunset is that it may not happen — legislation has repeatedly modified, extended, or replaced scheduled expirations, often late, sometimes retroactively. Which means every recommendation has to survive two outcomes rather than ...

Before evaluating any of this, understand the statistical situation you are in. It determines everything else.

Fraud is rare. In a population of transactions, the fraudulent proportion is very small. And that single fact creates a problem that no amount of model accuracy solves:

When the underlying rate is very low, most of what a model flags will be legitimate — even when the model is highly accurate.

The intuition people bring is ...

Our post on whether to add a planning credential covers the decision. This one assumes you have made it, and addresses the part that actually determines whether it works.

Which is not the exam. It is that integrating planning into a CPA practice changes your regulatory position, and most firms discover that after they have started marketing.

The Sentence That Forces a Decision

Here

There is a sentence that should precede every conversation about audit analytics, and it usually does not:

Testing 100% of a population provides no assurance if you cannot establish that the population is complete and accurate.

An auditor who extracts a transaction file, runs every test on all of it, and finds nothing has demonstrated something about that file — not about the client's transactions. If the extraction omitted a subsidiary ...