For CPA societies and groups that provide Continuing Professional Education (CPE), compliance is more challenging than almost any other CE.
Accountants want easy to access content but boards of accountancy expect accurate reporting and constant check-ins. Education teams are expected to manage growing catalogs of courses, webinars, conferences, and certificates, often with limited staff and resources.
What makes this so challenging are the NASBA Standards for Continuing Professional Education Programs.
If you are a CPA society, accounting association, training organization, or corporate provider for revenue, knowing these standards and following them allow you to claim you are NASBA approved.
This guide explains what NASBA standards are, how they impact day-to-day program administration, common compliance challenges, and how modern learning technology can help organizations manage CPE programs more efficiently.
The National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) serves as a forum for the nation's boards of accountancy and plays a central role in supporting CPA licensure and professional competency.
The most visible initiative of NASBA is the National Registry of CPE Sponsors, which establishes standards for organizations that provide continuing professional education to accounting professionals.
The Registry helps ensure that CPE providers deliver educational activities that meet consistent standards for quality, documentation, and administrative oversight.
For many CPA societies and accounting organizations, maintaining compliance with NASBA standards is an important part of building credibility and demonstrating educational excellence.
NASBA Standards as defined in their statement about CPE outlines requirements that providers must follow.
The standards cover several areas, including:
Although many providers focus only on the CPE delivery requirements, compliance is much more than that.
The standards are designed to ensure that educational activities produce meaningful learning outcomes while maintaining sufficient documentation to verify participation and completion.
Compliance is not about compliance for compliance sake.
Strong compliance practices ensure operational efficiency, better learner experiences and reputation.
Members rely on CPA societies and education providers to deliver learning experiences that count toward their professional requirements.
Accurate recordkeeping, reliable transcripts, and properly documented credits help build confidence in your education program.
Organizations may be required to demonstrate compliance through audits, reviews, or accreditation processes.
Having standardized documentation and centralized reporting significantly reduces audit preparation time.
Many education departments still rely on spreadsheets, disconnected webinar platforms, and manual certificate processes.
As programs grow, these workflows become increasingly difficult to manage.
Organizations that implement scalable compliance processes spend less time on administration and more time delivering value to learners.
The Statement on Standards for Continuing Professional Education Programs serves as the framework that governs approved providers.
The standards emphasize a handful of core principles:
Programs must have clear learning objectives and provide content that supports professional competency.
Providers must be able to demonstrate that participants completed the educational activity and earned the credit awarded.
Organizations must maintain sufficient records to support compliance and respond to audit requests.
Learner evaluations and program reviews help providers assess effectiveness and improve educational quality over time.
The common theme across all requirements is documentation and accountability. If an organization cannot demonstrate compliance through records and processes, it may face significant challenges during reviews or audits.
Today's CPA societies offer education in a variety of formats, each with unique compliance considerations.
These include:
Providers must establish methods for documenting attendance and verifying participation.
Webinars and virtual conferences have become increasingly common.
Organizations must be able to document participation and demonstrate that learners met attendance requirements.
This is one reason webinar integrations have become such an important component of modern CPE management.
Self-study courses require providers to establish completion criteria and assessment procedures.
Organizations must verify that participants successfully completed the learning activity before awarding credit.
Many organizations now combine live and on-demand learning experiences.
Managing compliance across multiple delivery methods often requires more sophisticated administrative processes and technology systems.
One of the most frequently misunderstood aspects of compliance involves credit calculation.
As of 2026, while specific rules may vary depending on the learning format and jurisdiction, CPE credit is generally based on a 50-minute hour.
Providers should establish standardized processes for calculating:
Manual credit calculations increase the likelihood of errors, particularly for organizations managing large educational catalogs.
Automated credit management can help ensure consistency while reducing administrative workload.
Every educational activity should have documented learning objectives that communicate intended outcomes.
Strong learning objectives help learners understand expectations while supporting instructional quality.
Providers must have processes for documenting participation and verifying attendance.
The method may vary depending on whether the activity is live, virtual, or self-paced.
Evaluations provide valuable feedback and support ongoing program improvement.
Standardized evaluation workflows help ensure consistency across all educational offerings.
Organizations must retain records related to educational activities, attendance, assessments, and completion documentation.
Centralized storage is one of the most effective ways to simplify this requirement.
Certificates must accurately reflect earned credit and completion information.
Automating certificate generation reduces errors and improves the learner experience.
Even experienced providers can encounter compliance issues.
Spreadsheets often lead to missing records, inconsistent reporting, and increased administrative effort.
When webinar data, learner records, certificates, and evaluations exist in separate platforms, audit preparation becomes far more difficult.
Organizations that calculate credits manually may experience discrepancies across programs.
Learners increasingly expect immediate access to certificates and transcripts.
Manual processes often create delays and additional support requests.
Many organizations discover reporting gaps only when preparing for audits or accreditation reviews.
By then, correcting missing data can be extremely difficult.
Audit preparation becomes significantly easier when compliance processes are built into daily operations.
Organizations should be able to quickly retrieve:
If gathering this information requires pulling reports from multiple systems, compliance management can quickly become a major administrative project.
The most successful CPA societies treat audit readiness as an ongoing operational process rather than a periodic event.
Technology alone does not create compliance, but it can dramatically reduce the effort required to maintain it.
Modern learning management systems can automate many of the most time-consuming administrative tasks associated with CPE programs.
These include:
Organizations that consolidate these functions into a single platform often improve both efficiency and data accuracy.
NASBA approves providers, not learning management systems. However, the right continuing education LMS can help organizations support compliance requirements while improving the learner experience.
Best for CPA societies, associations, and continuing education providers.
OasisLMS was designed specifically for organizations that manage continuing education, certifications, conferences, and professional development programs.
Key strengths include:
For CPA societies seeking a platform aligned with the operational realities of CPE administration, OasisLMS offers purpose-built functionality that reduces manual effort while supporting compliance objectives.
Best for large enterprise organizations.
Cornerstone provides extensive learning and talent management capabilities and is widely used by large employers.
Organizations with complex internal training programs may benefit from its scalability and workforce development tools.
Best for advanced learning experiences.
Brightspace offers strong assessment capabilities, learner engagement tools, and analytics.
It is commonly used in higher education.
Best for organizations seeking extensive customization.
As an open-source platform, Moodle offers flexibility and a large ecosystem of plugins. However, organizations should be prepared to invest in configuration and ongoing maintenance.
When evaluating a learning platform, CPA societies should prioritize features that directly support compliance and operational efficiency.
Look for:
The right LMS should not simply deliver content, it should simplify administration and help education teams maintain compliance with confidence.
NASBA standards are about integrity, consistency and enhancing the learner experience.
For CPA societies and CPE providers, being compliant is more than just keeping track of CPE earned and certificates. It means having a process and/or system that allows repeatable and consistent delivery of educational materials while tracking learner time spent.
As programs continue to grow in complexity or new programs are added, groups that invest in technology are able to scale rapidly and ensure a consistent and learner friendly experience.
The goal is not to just meet NASBA standards. It's to build a CPE program that learners trust, is easy to manage, and organizations can scale for many years.
Whether managing CME for physicians or supporting member growth, Oasis LMS helps deliver high-impact education efficiently and at scale.
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