Audit ACA wants a change of direction - ATT or CTA??

Hi,

I am looking to set my career moving in a different direction and am hoping to get some advice as to whether the ATT or CTA would be most suitable to help me make this change. I want to move towards becoming a more general practice accountant, working with smaller business/sole traders and once sufficiently experienced, I hope to begin to work freelance.

I had initially assumed that the natural step for an ACA was to carry on to study the CTA, and worried that the ATT would be somewhat of a repetition of my ACA knowledge. Having read other posts however, the CTA would appear more geared up towards becoming a specialist adviser, whilst the ATT is more geared up towards actually processing the practical aspects of tax for clients. Does this distinction sound accurate? Given my ultimate goal of becoming freelance in the future (and how rusty I am since sitting my ACA tax exams way back in the application stage of the ACA) and working closely with sole traders/owner managed businesses I now think that the ATT is probably best option for me. Would you agree? I don't want to choose whichever is the easiest (I performed extremely well during my ACA studies) but whichever will genuinely be more useful to me

The reason this would be a change of direction for me is that I, like countless others, trained in Audit for one of the larger firms whilst studying for my ACA (qualified in July 2010), experiencing little practical application of the tax knowledge gained during my ACA studies. Looking for a change from the audit treadmill, I then moved in to commerce to work for a multinational company within financial reportingl. I have realized that my initial passion which led me to accounting in the first place was an interest in entrepreneurship and small businesses/growth businesses and that this part of me does not feel comfortable in the large corporate world. This is exacerbated every time a friend asks me to prepare their tax return/sole trader accounts and I feel I just don’t have the experience having never done this before.

I realise this is quite a long question, so thanks for reading this far! I wanted to give you sufficient background so that this doesn't turn in to a 'which is better, ATT or CTA' discussion, but which qualification will best prepare an audit trained ACA for a more general role.

 Many thanks.