Extra help eases IFRS transition
There are many schools of thought on how best to manage the transition to IFRS. Finance directors can hire external help or manage the change in-house with available resources. Aveva Group FD Paul Taylor says the engineering software organisation chose a hybrid option.
Aveva didn’t bring in consultants but did hire someone out of practice. “They’re still with the business today,” Taylor says.
“We did this because of the sheer amount of information needed and process change involved in the transition and the fact that we still needed to help run the business. We felt we needed an independent view.”
Aveva was one of the first companies to adopt IFRS and to report a full set of IFRS accounts. “We didn’t have a lot of benchmarking to see what the industry was doing,” Taylor notes. The company has now moved towards a “much more common reporting structure” where it has local books and IFRS-adjusted books on a consolidated basis.
For those FDs who have yet to make the switch, take heart. While Taylor admits it was a “painful process”, it’s now a relatively straight forward process. Taylor says: “The team has done a very, very good job. We now have one or two people who are very au fait with the details and keep me up to date with everything.
"Like many things, adopting international standards were difficult to apply in the first instance and relatively simple in the second.”
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