Apprenticeship Standard: Assistant Accountant L3

Financial Accounting: Preparing Financial Statements: Focuses on preparing the key statements for sole traders and partnerships as well as acquiring advanced double entry skills.

Management Accounting Techniques: Develops the knowledge and skills needed to understand the role and importance to decision making as well as key budgetary and costing principles.

Tax Processes for Businesses: Teaches the skills and knowledge needed to prepare VAT returns to HMRC.

Business Awareness: Provides an understanding of the business, its environment and the role of the Accounting function as well as the importance of ethics within the profession.

Financial Accounting: Preparing Financial Statements: Learners will gain the double-entry bookkeeping skills required to record financial transactions into an organisation’s accounts using a manual bookkeeping system. They will take this forward to carry out adjustments, ensuring that the accounts conform to the accruals basis of Accounting. Students will understand depreciation, where the loss of value of a non-current asset during a period is reflected in the profit figure for that period. They will also learn to account for allowances for doubtful receivables where account is taken for the likelihood that not all credit customers will pay in full. Finally, the unit teaches learners to produce profit or loss statements of financial position for sole traders and partnerships using a trial balance.

Management Accounting Techniques: Teaches the principles that underpin Management Accounting methodology and techniques, how costs are handled in organisations, and why organisations treat costs in different ways. Leaders will be able to recognise different approaches to Management Accounting and provide informed and reasoned judgements to guide management. They will also learn how to apply these principles and appreciate why effective Management Accounting is crucial to any organisation. Learners will learn the techniques required for dealing with direct costs and revenues, and with the treatment of short-term overhead costs. They will also learn the techniques required for decision making, using estimates of costs, revenues and cashflow. Apprentices will learn to carry out procedures as they would in a real world organisation’s finance function including: undertaking budgetary overhead apportionments and producing recovery rates, carrying out basic variance and cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis, calculating changes in forecast unit costs and profits, calculating working capital measures, producing simple budgets, monitoring cash flow and reporting accounting information. Learners will use spreadsheets for making calculations, manipulating and analysing data, reporting, and forecasting. Skills such as the use of formulas, functions, data analysis tools, sorting and filtering will be vital within Accountancy to enable students to perform complex calculations quickly and accurately. After analysis, the data needs to be comprehensively checked and then presented using a range of methods, for example as a structured spreadsheet with pivot tables and charts.

Tax Processes for Businesses: This unit provides students with the knowledge and skills that are needed to keep businesses, employers and clients compliant with laws and practices that apply to VAT and payroll. Apprentices will learn about legislation and the importance of maintaining their technical knowledge through monitoring updates. For VAT, learners will understand the registration and deregistration rules, including signing up for Making Tax Digital (MTD), and the rules relating to specialist VAT schemes. Learners will be able to recognise different types of supplies and calculate VAT correctly, understanding the importance of the rules relating to the recovery of input VAT and the sanctions and penalties for inaccuracies, omissions and failure to make submissions and payments within the correct timescales. Apprentices will be able to verify the accuracy of calculations, invoices and tax points, and will learn about the correction of errors. When learning about the content of the VAT return, learners will understand how to apply special rules when goods and services are imported and exported out of the UK and the European Union (EU), and how to extract the appropriate data to complete VAT returns.

Business Awareness: Apprentices will examine the purposes and types of businesses that exist, and the rights and responsibilities of key stakeholders. They will learn what the micro and macro-economic environments are and the impact and influence that changes in these environments can have on performance and decisions. This will include an understanding of the basic business law relating to the preparation of financial statements for different types of entities. Students will learn about the concepts of risk, types of risk and risk management for a business. They will understand the importance of professional ethics and ethical management, and how the finance function interacts with other key business functions to enhance operational efficiency. Apprentices will learn the core aspects of the ethical code for Accountants and will apply these principles to analyse and judge ethical situations which could arise in the workplace. They will also understand how acting ethically stems from core personal and organisational values, as well as understanding the legal and regulatory framework for anti-money laundering.