ACCA

Daner

Hello I'm soon to be graduating university this year, and have secured myself voluntary work in an accountancy firm as I have no previous experience. I want to do ACCA but this firm is unable to fund me, would you suggest leaving and trying to get a company that will fund me or stay there and and fund myself through home study with a provider like BPP? I have the money to be able to this. I've also applied for grad schemes but I'm likely to leave with a 2:2 so may be difficult. What do you recommend? The voluntary work will not be every day.

ariadne

I'd keep your voluntary job, they are tough to get and very valuable for future job hunting. You can carry on looking and applying in the meantime. Depending on location there may not be a lot of entry level jobs available - I say entry level as opposed to graduate as you may have more success in such roles if your degree isn't high enough or competition too fierce, although it all leads to being a chartered accountant eventually.

If you are keen to start immediately then you could consider buying the books and getting a head start on the study. ACCA gets in depth very quickly whereas AAT is good for a more thorough and gentle introduction to accounting. I got AAT L3 recently and am studying with both AAT and ACCA books to probably take the ACCA F1-3 papers self study. It's a lot easier starting ACCA having done AAT but plenty of people do ACCA from scratch. The tutorials at OpenTuition (for example F3 is financial statements and double entry) may help you decide whether you could start studying without a provider. You just need to join ACCA once you are ready to take the exam and the exams are about £80 each via Kaplan etc.

Daner

Thank you for the reply it's helped me out a lot . If I was to self study would I only have to pay for the exams I sit and that's it? And the ACCA membership fee? Or is there any other hidden costs I'm looking at?

ariadne

Just the books on top of exam and membership fees, although I've seen people mention only using opentuition resources with a book of practice questions/tests. I have the BBP text books and they are very dense.

Doing the first three papers will get you a lower level qualification once you do an extra online thing, ethics I think. The first three exams are computer based, can be taken any time and give an immediate result, as does F4, but the later exams are done at certain times in the year and hand marked so may be more expensive - hopefully you'll have a sponsor by then.

Daner

Thank you for the help Ariadne, could I ask one more question please. Regarding the ACCA PER what types of roles would be considered relevant? Would jobs such as bookkeeping, Assistant Accountant, Payroll be suitable? Thank you

ariadne

I'd give ACCA a call on that one. I haven't looked at this fully because you have ten years to get the exams and (3 yrs) experience complete so figured I'd end up in the right role even if I start off doing lower level work initially to gain experience. I'm in a different stage of life so happy to take things slow (or have to for childcare) and start the exams before getting the perfect job role. I suspect accounts assistant would be ideal but have a look a job ads and see what roles come up for ACCA, call a specialist recruiter and try to get to career fairs - AAT do one so I'd hope other bodies would too. Don't bother with the big firms as they wont talk to you if you don't meet their requirements - my a levels weren't great so despite getting a 2.1 at a top uni and AAT L3, they wouldn't even talk to me about work experience.

There is more ACCA discussions elsewhere, OpenTuition for example, only a few people have knowledge on ACCA etc here.