ICAEW Qualified Accountants can get a Practising Certificate

Background 

If you’re qualified with ICAEW and have the ACA or FCA qualifications, you worked really hard to get them. Some of you may already have an ICAEW practising certificate while others might not.

ICAEW has been around for over 140 years and it was Queen Victoria who gave the organisation a Royal Charter, allowing you to use the designation ‘chartered accountant.’  

Where can you go with the qualification? 

There are just under 200,000 ICAEW members globally and the world is your oyster. Many choose to stay in practice and many choose to go into industry. Because you’re a chartered accountant, you’re popular with the Big Four and other accountancy practices who pursue audit and other similar work. 

A lot of you will have started your careers with the Big Four because they often sponsor you to finish your ICAEW qualification.  

Resources available to you 

If you’re keen to open a practice, ICEAW has a Practice Committee with 20 members to help other members who want to work in practice. This committee is supposed to:

“identify and advise ICAEW of any current and emerging issues that impact members in practice, work with ICAEW to ensure that members in practice are kept informed of such issues and help ICAEW ensure that it addresses the issues in question.”

If you want to open a practice then, reaching out to the committee is a good way to access shared resources to help you make the right decisions.  

Get yourself a practising certificate 

It’s best to speak directly to ICAEW about this, but broadly speaking, there are 6 criteria you must meet to get your practising certificate: 

1. You have to be a member for at least 2 years.
   
2. You must complete the application form and the “are you ready to go into practice?” Checklist. 
3. You need to have complied with ICAEW’s requirements on CPD for the two years preceding your application. 
4. You must understand the Fundamental Principles in ICAEW’s Code of Ethics, in particular, Section 130, which covers professional competence and due care. 
5. You must get some Professional Indemnity Insurance. 
6. You must hold no ICAEW disciplinary records. 

45% of AIMS Accountants are ICAEW qualified, so you can certainly get a practising certificate and run a successful accountancy practice of your own. We’ve been through this process hundreds of times so we know.  

If you want more advice on this process, or if you want to attend a free discovery session with AIMS, visit our website here.