August 1999

FAE Courses Filled to Capacity

Members Encouraged to Register Early

Greater-than-usual attendance at seminars and conferences and later-than-ever registrations have prompted the Foundation for Accounting Education to encourage members to register early for events. FAE staff members say this will help ensure member placement in their desired courses and enable the smooth running of events.

"It's hard to prepare when you don't know how many people to expect," Annette Davis, manager of FAE education, said. "Earlier member registration would help us avoid having to turn members away."

FAE staff members typically rent rooms for seminars six to 12 months before an event. They monitor registration closely and talk to hotels about larger rooms as needs arise.

"Hotels want to know head counts three weeks in advance," Davis said. "It's hard to do this when we're not sure how many people will come until the morning an event starts."

To allow time for shipping, class rosters are printed and delivered to locations two days in advance of an event, according to Joyce Lewis, FAE education supervisor.

"If someone registers after we've shipped the class roster, it creates confusion at the registration table," Lewis said. "Since these participants aren't on the roster, we have to manually register them. This takes more time."

FAE Director of Education Services Frimette-Kass Shraibman remembers a specific instance when this problem occurred.

"I heard a lot of complaints about the administration of the Estate Planning Conference," Kass-Shraibman said. "When I looked at the registration statistics, I found that forty-nine of the two hundred and one participants registered late, which meant that they had to be manually registered the morning of the conference. This caused crowding and confusion in the registration area."

Kass-Shraibman also reported that at five FAE events during July, both late and walk-in registrants were turned away because of limited seating space in the classroom or lack of books and handouts.

"We've also unnecessarily canceled some programs," Davis said. "Seven days before the Annual Study Conference was set to begin, we had only sixteen registrants. We canceled because we would have lost over ten thousand dollars. The next day, ten more registrations came in. We still would have lost money, but it would have been a smaller amount. We called the hotel, but because of the popularity of the Saratoga racing season, they'd already given the rooms away."

Kass-Shraibman thinks the reason for so many late registrants has to do with how CPAs perceive CPE.

"I think many CPAs view CPE as a requirement that they fit in for a day here or there when they have time," she said. "When they see the light of day, they pick up the phone to register to get part of their requirements over and done with."

Kass-Shraibman would like to change this perception.

"Education and training should be viewed as opportunities to expand and improve skills in key practice areas," she said. "Well-planned education is a catalyst for expanding professional skills and increasing income."

The entire FAE staff agrees that the key to a smooth event is for participants to register well in advance.