Route 102 - One man’s year-long journey through an accounting standard

By Mercia Group
5 January 2015 00:00

Happy New Year! It's Monday, 5 January 2015, and we're already five days into the first mandatory application period of FRS 102 - the future of UK GAAP.

To mark this momentous year, I'm embarking on a mission to work my way through the standard, reading a portion on each working day of 2015 and writing a short blog entry on my thoughts and musings (be they few or many). If that seems a crazy idea, maybe it's because the Christmas sherry hasn't yet worn off...anyway, here goes:

DAY ONE (5 Jan)

Some quick FRS 102 facts to get started:

There are 360 pages in the Standard and around 147,000 words (I can verify this, as there was very little good Christmas telly this year).

That is a LOT less than current (soon to be 'previous') UK GAAP, which is often quoted as running to around 3,000 pages. Of course, page counts are somewhat misleading due to typesetting and page sizes, but it's still considerably shorter than before.

The Standard is organised into 35 sections. There is some broad logic to the order of these. The first ten cover concepts, primary statements and accounting policies. The next ten cover assets (for the most part) though not in balance sheet order, and then it all starts to get a bit more messy. Section 34 covers specialised activities and section 35 covers transition to the Standard.

The standard is based on the IFRS for SMEs, even including blank 'not used' paragraphs where the corresponding paragraph from the IFRS has been dropped. However, it is a heavily edited version, carrying over several of the options from UK GAAP that were omitted from the IFRS.

Tomorrow, I'll begin at section 1 which outlines the scope of the standard.

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