It was announced last month at the Institute’s conference
that the membership structure will change from January 2011, and members will have until September 2011 to ensure their membership grade is brought up to date. This decision follows major changes to the National Occupational Standards being introduced during 2010 by the Financial Services Skills Council (FSSC), of which the Institute is a member.
Under the new Standards, all students and applicants will prove competence in both manual and computerised bookkeeping rather than, as at the moment, electing to take either just the manual or just the computerised route, which will no longer be an option. This will have the added benefit of streamlining the ICB’s complex membership structure which is currently the source of some confusion to members as well as employers and clients.
All members with the following designatory letters:
- AICB
- MICB
- AICB (Comp)
- MICB (Comp)
will need to achieve either AICB CB.Cert or MICB CB.Dip status by the end of September 2011.
Any members already at grades
have completed both manual and computerised qualifications at their chosen level so are already compliant.
Members who are currently AICB (Comp) or MICB (Comp) have until the end of September 2011 to prove competence in the manual bookkeeping element of the Institute’s syllabus whilst existing AICBs and MICBs will have to prove competence with a bookkeeping software package.
The move was warmly welcomed by delegates at the conference, with most members feeling relieved that the AICB and AICB (Comp) anomaly will finally be clarified. One Institute member who runs a small practice in the Midlands said
“this makes absolute sense. A decent bookkeeper needs to know how to run a set of books on a software package but they also really should know what the computer is doing for them”.
Over the next couple of months members will be contacted with specific instructions on how this will affect them and what they need to do to comply with the new membership criteria.