Visual Representation of Accounting Standards

The new normal in the regulatory environment of financial reporting is rapid changes in accounting standards with large philosophical and conceptual shifts in underlying principles. For example, in the realm of the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), newly issued IFRS 9 Financial Instruments, IFRS 10 Consolidated Financial Statements, IFRS 11 Joint Arrangements and IFRS 13 Fair Value Measurement have significant impacts on the future of financial reporting. Further, the exposure drafts on lease accounting and revenue recognition are likely to be released in the year 2014 that would change well-established accounting approaches. An accounting professor faces the tremendous challenge of equipping students to deal with the rapid change in accounting standards. This paper offers a project assignment that accounting professors teaching the Advanced Financial Accounting (AFA) course can use to instil in students the skills of analyzing and deconstructing the logical flow of an accounting standard. This project assignment has been rated on “quality and usefulness” by students as “most useful” at a very high score of 6.54 out of a perfect score of 7, which is 95th percentile in the university-wide ranking.