Hi Clare,

welcome to the forum.

excellent advice there from Neil.

Considering your background I would say that the following options would be your best approaches.

ICB or IAB.
Do it yourself, you can just buy the books and pay to sit the exams without a training provider.
ICB is well respected and seems to be gaining momentum in the industry as a spokes voice for bookkeepers.
IAB is an older qualification (the ICB was formed from renegade members of the IAB about 15 years ago). Attaining an IAB qualification is the same level as the ICB qualification but It gives more exemptions from other qualifications if you want to move further up the tree.
Best idea is to check out both websites and postings on this forum to see which of those two is right for you if that was the level you wanted to come in at.

AAT
If you want to move between jobs in Accounting then this is still considered to be the entry level qualification to have.
For AAT you will need a training provider which could be a local college or distance learning provider. If you go for distance learning then the three that always get well spoken about on this site are Premier Training and Kaplan Financial (Conversely I've yet to see a good word said on the site about Home Learning College!).

There are many other options such as the ICAEW CFAB qualification, ACCA foundations in Accountancy (or even full ACCA qualification), AAT ABC bookkeeping as well as many, many other qualifications not all of which are easily recognised by many employers.

However, all in all I think that your optimal approach to qualificationwould be with ICB, IAB or AAT and to be honest of those three I would personally advise in your case AAT with Kaplan financial as your training provider (Yes Neil, I think that you got it absolutely right!).

You will find doing AAT more expensive than the other two options that you can do yourself but it is still the most recognised of those qualifications with employers and is the traditional stepping stone to the higher qualifications such as ACCA or CIMA (although CIMA now being traitors and joining up with the Americans I personally wouldn't be brave enough to sign up with them at the moment for worry about what the rest of the bodies might do to them next. ACCA has already drawn the battle lines by downgrading the CIMA qualification for transfers and exemptions purposes... Oops, going off peist again!).

Right, my two penneth. For yourself who seems to indicate that you are interested in qualification for employment rather than self employment I would say the AAT qualification with Kaplan financial.

Now back to the forum to tell me exactly why I'm wrong.

kind regards,

Shaun.