IMA23 for CMA Candidates: A Chance to Hone Your Skills
IMA’s Accounting & Finance Conference (IMA23) will offer opportunities for CMA® (Certified Management Accountant) candidates to hone their accounting and finance skills—with luck, just in time to take the exam. The conference will be held in person on June 11-14, 2023, at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis. Visit www.imaconference.org to learn more and to register.
Potential sessions of interest to CMA candidates include:
Financial Reporting at a Crossroads: Update and Perspectives on New Rules and Trends: Hear from a panel of experts who will provide an update on recently issued rules by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and a broader consideration of where financial reporting is headed. Finance and accounting leaders also discuss the practicalities of implementing these new rules and the bigger picture that balances the perspectives of auditors, valuation experts, and investors.
Strategic Finance and Evolution of FP&A: Explore how behaviors, activities, and technologies have helped to create more strategic financial planning and analysis (FP&A) organizations. Erin Stieber of Discover Financial Services will discuss the differences between traditional and strategic FP&A. She’ll also delve into how teams can leverage technology and apply the key components of strategic FP&A to create long-term value for an organization.
The Agile Finance Function: Discovering the Balance Between Flexibility and Stability (two-part workshop): Organizational agility–is it a buzzword or success factor? This question is still being asked by numerous managers. Although agile methods enable fast sensing and responding to opportunities or changes, they often encounter rigid control processes. The finance function is therefore challenged to execute an agile transformation within an organization, and to develop and use the potential of agility. Attendees in this workshop will learn key agile concepts and explore how they differ from traditional approaches.
Profitability Management from Both Sides of the Coin: This session dives into a critical topic during these inflationary times—namely, how can management accountants better manage profitability and support better decision making and insight? The session will explore current challenges and shortcomings of traditional cost accounting while examining the revenue side to assess an area—pricing—where there is still a great deal of work to do.
Introduction to Data Analytics and Microsoft Power BI (two-part workshop): This session will give a hands-on introduction to Microsoft Power BI, a business intelligence tool that has been developed with Excel users in mind. It will provide participants with the knowledge to extract, clean, restructure, and integrate data as well as enhance data sets with information that they need for decision making. Participants also learn how to build powerful interactive reports with little effort and apply data analytics in an accounting context.
Current Issues in Business Ethics-2023: Boz Bostrom, professor of accounting and finance at College of Sain Benedict and Saint John’s University, provides an update on accounting and business ethics issues. He’ll review current ethical violations and discuss what we may learn from them in order to avoid similar pitfalls.
The conference also offers an excellent opportunity for CMA candidates to network with other candidates as well as to meet current CMAs eager to share their professional advice.
To learn more about the conference, please visit IMA23.
