CPD for accountants: ACCA, ICAEW and CIMA requirements compared

If you hold more than one accountancy designation, or you are moving between bodies, the CPD rules can look wilfully inconsistent. They are not identical, but the underlying expectation is the same: keep learning, and be able to show it.

ACCA

ACCA runs an hours-based unit system. Members in practice or employment follow the standard route: 40 units per year, of which at least 21 must be verifiable. A unit is one hour.

Verifiable CPD must be relevant to your work, something you can demonstrate you learned from, and evidenced - a certificate, an email confirmation, notes, or a record of the activity. Non-verifiable CPD is anything relevant you cannot evidence: reading, keeping up with technical news, informal discussion.

ACCA also samples members each year for CPD review, so a record with dates, hours and evidence references is not optional in practice.

ICAEW

ICAEW moved to a category-based model. Members are placed in one of three categories based on the risk and nature of their role, and each category carries a different minimum: broadly 40, 30 or 20 hours a year, with a set number of verifiable hours within that. All members must also complete at least one hour of ethics learning annually.

The important shift is that ICAEW expects you to identify your own category and to reflect on whether your learning met your development needs - not just to count hours.

CIMA

CIMA takes an outcomes-based approach and does not set a minimum number of hours at all. Instead you are expected to follow a cycle: reflect on your role, plan the development you need, act on it, and evaluate whether it worked. You keep a record of that cycle, and CIMA can ask to see it.

That sounds softer. In practice it is harder to fake, because you are evidencing relevance and impact rather than attendance.

What they have in common

• Learning must be relevant to your current or intended role
• Ethics is expected of all three, explicitly at ICAEW
• All three can ask to see your record
• Reflection - what changed as a result - is increasingly the part that carries weight

Practical advice if you hold more than one designation

Keep one log, not three. Record date, activity, provider, hours, whether it is verifiable, and two lines of reflection. From that single record you can produce an ACCA unit count, an ICAEW category return and a CIMA development cycle summary without doing the work three times.

The evidence habit

The single biggest cause of stress at review time is missing evidence for training you genuinely completed. Save the confirmation email at the moment it arrives and attach it to the log entry there and then. Six months later that email is unfindable.

Keep your CPD in one place

A record only helps if it exists before you need it. Our free CPD tracker logs an activity in seconds, tallies your hours automatically, keeps your reflections with the entry, and exports a clean PDF whenever you need evidence. Free for life for individuals - and the record belongs to you, not your employer.