CPD support for sole practitioners

Free and value-for-money resources

As part of your ICAEW membership you have access to a range of resources that can support you in meeting your CPD obligations, many of which will be verifiable using the AddCPD tool. These include:

• faculty content covering: audit and assurance, corporate reporting and tax;
• content produced by more than 30 communities, focused on individual industry sectors and specialisms;
• practical guidance and helpsheets from ICAEW's Technical Advisory Services;
• current affairs updates through ICAEW Insights, which offers daily updates, as well as three regular podcasts, and
• online training courses, covering ethics, technology and charity trustees’ responsibilities. 

Free content from other organisations can also contribute to your CPD, if relevant to your professional development. Examples could include FRC reports or webinars from HMRC. If you are able to receive or download proof that you’ve attended or participated in a webinar or event, then this activity can count towards your verifiable hours.

Verifying CPD

There are lots of options and sources of CPD activities that can be independently verified. We have produced detailed guidance outlining examples of evidence that we would expect for CPD to classify as verifiable. 

We appreciate that if you're a sole practitioner, some of these options might be more difficult to verify, in particular there are no senior managers to sign your on-the-job learning form. However, there may be other ways to verify on-the-job CPD activities. For example:

• If you consult a technical expert to get more information to resolve an issue, could you provide evidence of your communication with that expert?
• If you carry out technical research for a client-specific issue, could you demonstrate this by way of the file note you prepared, or the report issued to the client?

Meanwhile, if you're carrying out research on icaew.com you should be able to use the AddCPD tool to verify your activities. The tool appears at the bottom right of your screen when you are logged into the site. It enables you to log how long you were viewing, listening or reading content on a webpage, as well as what you learned, and add this as an activity on your online CPD record. 

Tax services for high-net-worth clients

For the purposes of the CPD Regulations, we define high-net-worth individuals as those with a net worth greater than £20m. If you’re providing any services for high-net-worth clients this work is likely to be higher risk and subject to higher levels of attention and scrutiny, for example, from HMRC.

The additional complexity and risk mean that undertaking any amount of work for high-net-worth individuals, even if it's for a single client, means that you will fall into practice CPD category 1.

It’s not about how much of your time you spend doing this work. The fact that you do it at all means you need to be as competent and up to date as you can be on the emerging technical aspects, and that’s why it puts you in practice CPD category 1.