Introduction
Graduates often take up learnerships within the profession but do not make it due to inadequate accounting skills/experience. Guarantee Trust has created an innovative concept of fast tracking graduates to the point that they have the equivalent of one year work experience in a practice. This we call Virtual Office or VO for short.
The Virtual Office is part of our work-readiness program. The program addresses this very real weakness and gives our graduates the confidence and support together with the space to make mistakes with real company records. This is a luxury that you the practitioner cannot afford in the pressured office and market environment. Our graduates are more valuable to their employers than those selected from traditional sources, as more time is spent on training that covers productive, income earning activities. This results in the firms being able to charge fees for the work don e by these graduates straight away.
Innovation:
This innovation is a first in this field as far as we know. We are not aware of any other program of this nature. NASA and the pilot training field have simulation training but not the accounting profession.
We started the Virtual Office implementation early 2007 and it is now a slick well-functioning program. VO graduates are well ahead of graduates directly out of universities as attested to by our client accounting firm
The academy is now SAIPA and AAT accredited.
All accountants and professionals who have been toured through our facilities both in Johannesburg and Durban have unequivocally endorsed and praised the program and process.
Most firms who have come through to see the VO are taking graduates now or booking them to start once they are complete. There is a buzz of excitement in the profession about our achievements.
The method:
The VO provides each trainee with source documents for real businesses, whose books have already been done. The trainees use the check sheet (shown on next page) to guide themselves through each step of the process. Each business is dealt with one at a time, VAT period by VAT period. Books are coded and processed and VAT returns completed per period. The checksheet shows the progressive process. Source materials for the next task are fed to the trainees only when they have completed the current task fully.
The last two columns of the checksheet show where the trainee signs off to indicate they have completed the task. The monitor, an experienced practicing accountant, then checks the work and if found to be correct, signs off in the last column.
This process continues until all pages of the checksheet are completed and all businesses have trial balances for the year in question.
Competence:
SAIPA have evaluated our program and besides accrediting the program have agreed to assess each VO trainee to establish their competence level with the view to offering a reduction to the three year learnership through RPL (Recognition of Prior Learning).
We have delivered our work-readiness program since 2003 and at the end of this year we will have completed 2420 trainees. 90% of them have been offered learnerships, most in the FASSET sector. The advent of the VO has created a new level of competence in each of our trainees and we now offer them to you.
