Waypoints: Ideas and Insights to Navigate Enterprise Complexity

When I talked with folks here at HORNE about the topic for this post, FAQs on the new revenue recognition standards, I asked them what questions they were getting about the implementation process for the new rules. After a few conversations, it became clear that we were much more likely to come across revenue recognition issues in the course of other discussions with clients. We really haven’t been asked much about the new standard from private companies. Currently, most questions relate to infrequent transactions or the impact of new sales contracts.

When the HORNE Public & Middle Market team started writing about the new lease standard and the new revenue recognition standard, the implementation deadlines seemed to be in the distant future. The guidance for the lease standard was just released in February of this year and doesn’t take effect for public companies until 2019 and for private companies until 2020. The revenue recognition standard deadlines are scheduled a year earlier—2018 and 2019 for public and private companies, respectively.

New Orleans provided a great venue for this year’s AICPA CFO Conference. CFOs from around the country arrived to expand their knowledge on topics from risk management to being an effective leader.  As someone in the accounting profession and not in that CFO, here are a few of my takeaways from the conference. 

I recently wrote about the major financial reporting changes in the new lease standard and the potential impacts the changes could have on your business. When I wrote the blog, the Financial Accounting Standards Board was finalizing the standard, and it officially issued the new lease guidance on Feb. 25.

Hidden underneath the significant changes to revenue recognition and leases is the FASB’s update to accounting for share-based payments. And those changes – in an area often perceived to be as complicated as an NFL playbook – just made our jobs a little easier.

Imagine this – you are a company with hundreds of thousands of customers. As part of doing business, you also have multi-year contracts with each of your customers.

Now imagine planning for the new revenue recognition standards. I know … it’s daunting. 

When I began my initial review of the new revenue recognition literature, I expected that some industries like technology, construction, telecommunications and software would see significant consequences to their financial reporting because of changes to the standards.

According to a recent article in Fortune magazine, the SEC questioned 88 percent of companies in the technology, media and telecommunications industries that went public in 2014 regarding their revenue recognition policies.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board gave us some good news and some bad news in a recent update. The good news is the Board has delayed the effective date for the proposed accounting standards update until periods beginning after December 15, 2017, giving everyone an extra year to prepare. The bad news is that the Board has given everyone an extra year to prepare. With this type of update, it is easy to put off making changes in your company until it’s too late. Don’t delay!