Linda is a South African resident and is currently a SAICA student working for a medium sized IRBA registered audit firm in Cape Town.

Prior to joining her current employer, Linda completed a SAICA accredited programme at a university in South Africa. She then entered into a SAICA training contract with her current employer. She has been in her role as an audit assistant for 18 months. Linda is considering transferring to ACCA, however, she does not want to lose all of her progress to date. Before Linda submits her application to ACCA, she checks the Exemptions calculator on ACCA’s website to see how many exemptions she can obtain from the Applied Knowledge and the Applied Skills levels based on her university course. Linda’s application is then assessed by the Education Recognition team at ACCA and credit given accordingly based on the relevant criteria in place at the time of application.

Linda also provides full evidence of her practical experience to date which she documents in ACCA’s Practical Experience Requirement (PER) recording tool (or equivalent) and gets this signed-off by her practical experience supervisor (PES)/training officer. Linda will then need to complete ACCA’s full PER consisting of 36 months of relevant experience (some of which she has already obtained) and completing all five essential performance objectives and four technical objectives (or equivalent).

In order to obtain ACCA membership, Linda needs to complete her ACCA studies first. At the Strategic Professional level Linda must successfully complete the two Essentials exams. In order to obtain the SA AQ Linda needs to choose the International variant of Advanced Audit and Assurance (AAA-INT) and either Advanced Financial Management (AFM) or the South Africa variant of Advanced Taxation (ATX-ZAF) as her Options exams.

Another requirement to obtain ACCA membership is to complete the Ethics and Professional Skills module (EPSM). This could be done alongside the exams at the Strategic Professional level and the completion of the PER.

As Linda is not yet an ACCA member, ACCA’s CPD requirements are not yet applicable to her. ACCA members are required to comply with the CPD requirements from the year following their admission to membership date. Once Linda decides that she wants to apply for ACCA’s SA AQ, she needs to ensure that, at the time of her application, she is fully compliant with ACCA’s CPD requirements. Linda will be required to successfully complete the Advanced Audit and Assurance exam together with the competence-based submission. This will demonstrate that her technical audit knowledge is up-to-date, which is an essential requirement in order to obtain the SA AQ. Therefore, Linda can apply for the ACCA SA AQ as soon as she gets admitted to membership based on her successful exam completion, the completion of the Ethics and Professional Skills Module (EPSM) and the completed practical experience requirement (PER).

In addition, Linda needs to document her work experience in the relevant training record and demonstrate that she has met the required nine audit competencies as specified in Annexure 4 of the RPL. The training record must be verified by a suitably qualified principal* who has detailed knowledge of Linda’s work.

* A principal is defined as an appropriately qualified member of a professional accountancy body who has overall responsibility for supervising the training of individuals towards ACCA’s practising certificates (and audit qualification) and acts as guarantor to ACCA that individuals have reached the required standards. In order to be eligible to act as a training principal, the individual must be a registered auditor in South Africa.