The Chief of Financial Management (CFM) of DND and the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) partnered in the professionalization of Logistics Officer and Non-Commissioned Member (NCM) Financial Services Administrators (FSA) in the National Defence. For FSAs, a professional development program, based on the applied content from the Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) Canada’s Advanced Certificate in Accounting and Finance, was created and culminates with a recognized certificate signed by CPA and RMC principal. The program, offered in English and French, includes five courses, detailed below:
CPA 010 - Public Sector Financial Management
This course focuses on how public sector entities of various kinds make the best use of the vast resources entrusted to them in creating public value. Public sector accounting is a core body of knowledge supporting financial management. The purpose of this course is to provide you with public sector financial management skills necessary to function in public sector environments of low to medium complexity and low uncertainty.
The course has two primary objectives:
- 1. The content will focus on applied knowledge, using authentic business scenarios that require you to demonstrate the application of technical and ethical knowledge.
- 2. Workplace skills, such as communicating, managing & analyze information, solving routine problems, personal management & teamwork, are integrated throughout the course.
CPA 020 - Public Sector Ethics
The Royal Military College of Canada in partnership with CPA Canada and the Financial Management Institute has created this course in public sector ethics.
This course is part of the public sector accounting certificate.
CPA 030 - Excel
Creating effective spreadsheets comes down to having a solid handle on Excel. You can strengthen your expertise in this essential accounting software with Introduction to Excel: Beginning the journey to spreadsheet mastery.
This course provides an overview of the Excel 365 user interface and explains areas you should understand long before you start working with formulas and power techniques. The resulting knowledge will enhance your accounting practice and allow you to better serve your clients or organization.
Course Learning Objectives
- 1. Familiarization with the Excel user interface
- 2. Entering, copying, pasting and clearing data
- 3. Formatting data and copying formats to other cells
- 4. Key windows and Excel keyboard shortcuts
- 5. Formatting any document to print as desired
CPA040 - Data Management and Data Analytics
It is an introductory course that covers the analysis and presentation of information from DND’s financial system of record, Defence Resource Management Information System (DRMIS), using integrated tools such as Power BI and the SAP Business Intelligence module, as well as external tools such as Excel. Designed to be a practical, hands-on introduction, this course will explain the concepts and uses of analytics, and provide step-by-step guidance for students to design their own queries, reports, and graphs and to automate these processes as much as possible. After completing this course, students will have the knowledge required to support DND leadership in making informed decisions based on standardized and validated data, presented in useful and understandable ways.
CPA050 – Management Accounting for Practitioners
FSAs work with a lot of financial information, using DRMIS and often Excel to manage budgets, report on expenditures, and provide information that helps commanders and managers understand the resources available to them and make decisions about how to implement and support their priorities. Management accounting refers to the whole process of interpreting and presenting financial data to internal decision-makers. In many ways, it allows for a lot more flexibility than financial accounting does, because formal financial statements must follow strict rules about what data is and isn't included, and how it is presented. Management accounting is therefore particularly relevant to FSAs, who are generally more involved with internal budget management and reporting, rather than with the Department's audited financial statements.
This course is intended to supplement the hands-on training provided in Borden, and the experience you've gained in the positions you've held, by giving you some relevant academic knowledge. It introduces the terms and main concepts of management accounting, many of which you have probably already been applying. Management Accounting for Practitioners will give you a basic understanding of some of the fundamental aspects of the wide field of practice covered by management accounting, and a common language to discuss them effectively with civilian FIs and military finance officers. Because a lot of management accounting focuses on cost accounting, it can be very useful in a government setting, where we're not driven by profit. Nevertheless, its heart is in manufacturing, where complex processes are applied to transform inputs (direct materials, labour, and overhead) into outputs, and so some of the lessons will examine how the concepts are used in a manufacturing environment. The point of those lessons is really to give you some familiarity with the building blocks of the management accounting subject area, even if you won't apply them directly in DND.
From there, we will expand into some specific DND applications of management accounting, such as how the Cost Factors Manual reflects principles of standard costs, and how the practice of variance analysis applies to quarterly reporting. Again, the idea is to provide you with just a basic understanding of the theoretical and academic concepts that financial professionals in DND practise every day. From that point, it is up to you to add any of these ideas to how you approach the data you pull out of DRMIS, in order to support and add value to your commander's decision-making process.