IFRS Conversions – What CFOs Need to Know and Do

March 3rd, 2009ERP, IFRS 1 Comment

2008 from Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants – “…Converting to IFRS will not merely be a technical accounting exercise, but more a widespread change management exercise that will impact many areas of the business. Any business function required to prepare financial information, or impacted by financial information, has the potential for change. Companies should expect changes to earnings and financial position. The possible implications for key business areas along with some examples are given below:
1. IT and Data Systems (IT) – Capability of system to produce dual financial statements (Canadian GAAP and IFRS) during the transition years, while maintaining system security and reliability…”

180 View – Accountants never seem to run out of work. They had a field day with Y2K, then SOX and now with IFRS. Despite all the courses and articles on IFRS, there is still a lot of confusion. One area that has come up a number of times with our clients has been with handling the transition year. The article states that “The main options available to converters involve either dual GAAP accounting throughout the transition period or some form of restatement from Canadian GAAP to IFRS at each reporting date.” The first option should require the ability to post transactions to multiple ledgers – one for GAAP and the other for IFRS. The second option should be easier to implement by simply just booking any IFRS adjustments to take a set of books from GAAP to IFRS.

One Response to “IFRS Conversions – What CFOs Need to Know and Do”

  1. March 20th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
    Andy Birch Says:

    Yes this is a good summary of one of the main concerns that we have heard from Financial Controllers and Accountants. Infor, as a global solution provider, has supported IFRS in our applications for a number of years. However, we recognised that given the global environment, many companies not only need to support multiple taxonomies but also as part of this the transition requirements such as changing GAAP, as well as simply coping with changing business conditions such as mergers and acquisitions.

    We are introducing an Advanced GL component that provides organizations with the capability to represent financial transactions in multiple books in order to support requirements for multiple compliance and operational purposes. These transactions could come from single or multiple sources/applications. This process is all handled automatically, according to the business rules defined by the customer.

    This then allows the customer to produce this information in parallel with no additional manual input and produce the necessary comparative financial statements and disclosure of the impact of IFRS. We have produced a whitepaper illustrating this in more detail.

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