IFRS and Finance standards

IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) or IAS (International Accounting Standards) – as they were called formerly – are receiving an increasing amount of attention.

Over the last few years, the world of financial reporting has completely changed. The impact of the mandatory introduction of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) across Europe – and their voluntary introduction across the financial reporting regimes of many other countries around the world – has become one of the biggest challenges facing companies today.

One aspect of the move to IFRS that is often ignored, as plans are drawn up and the deadlines loom, is that, as well as being a major change programme, conversion to IFRS usually involves having comparative figures for the period before the one actually being reported. For a company’s financial statements to comply with IFRS for the 2011 period, it needs an IFRS balance sheet for the 2009 year-end at the latest. Some stock exchanges may actually require two years of comparatives, which means using 2008 as the IFRS opening position.

To produce these comparative figures, many companies will need to use two charts of accounts – increasing work through manual consolidation. Our  Coda Financials solution is one of the few products that allows companies to produce these figures through a single chart of accounts.

Here is a selection of topical papers covering the issues and recent developments in the field of IFRS and other finance standards.