"Streamlining Your Conversion to IFRS: Challenges, Choices, and Transformative Technologies"

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"To help companies with their transition to IFRS, SAP sponsored a Webcast with CFO.com that highlights common IFRS adoption challenges and summarize typical U.S. GAAP-to-IFRS technical differences by major area, including potential impacts to sub ledgers."
Source: SAP

Resources Related to Streamlining Your Conversion to IFRS: Challenges, Choices, and Transformative Technologies:

• SAP AG (Wikipedia)
• International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) (Wikipedia)
• Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) (Wikipedia)

Streamlining Your Conversion to IFRS: Challenges, Choices, and Transformative Technologies

Now is the time to begin treating the IFRS transition as an opportunity rather than just a mandate. With careful planning and thoughtful execution, you can use IFRS adoption as a chance to review and improve your financial consolidation and reporting systems and enable rapid legal compliance.

Executive Summary
Making the Transition to IFRS: Seizing the Opportunity

To meet evolving regulatory mandates, companies around the world are adopting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), a set of methodologies and disclosure requirements for the preparation and presentation of financial statements. Yet making the transition to IFRS is not just a rote accounting exercise. Embracing these standards affects the entire company and requires the support of personnel throughout the enterprise. What's more, adopting IFRS requires careful planning and thoughtful execution to overcome the many inherent challenges of such an extensive and significant change.

If you must make the move to IFRS, however, it makes sense to take advantage of the opportunities this transition provides. Enterprises can realize benefits beyond simple compliance - ranging from reduced closing times to higher-quality information to support decision making. "[IFRS] convergence brings a onetime opportunity to comprehensively reassess financial reporting, taking a clean-sheet-of-paper approach to financial policies and processes and the technology that supports them," writes Andrew Bray, technology director at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in the 2009 white paper "Complying with International Financial Reporting Standards."

This paper from SAP describes the challenges faced by organizations that adopt IFRS, especially as they affect group financial reporting systems. This document also discusses critical decision points that you must address, as well as technology solutions that can help you successfully adopt IFRS.

The Call for Transparent Financial Reporting
Understanding the Scope and Impact of IFRS

The increasingly global nature of business practices is driving the need for international standards like IFRS. With a proliferation of financial products being bought and sold around the world, a global financial reporting standard can provide the essential transparency needed to build investor confidence and facilitate financial statement comparisons. Moreover, adopting IFRS is widely viewed as an efficient and cost-effective way to gain access to foreign capital markets, thanks to a lower cost of capital that derives from a reduced risk premium.

Leading companies recognize the need to move toward IFRS adoption in advance of any mandate. Recently, Accenture surveyed senior finance and operations executives at large global companies in a variety of industries. When asked when they expect IFRS adoption to become a priority for their organizations, 64% of respondents indicated that they are or will be focused on IFRS within the next 12 months.

These standards are developed using a consultation process involving individuals and organizations from around the world. Standards are prepared by the Intangible asset, can be depreciated International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), the independent standard setting body of the International Accounting Standards Committee Foundation.

IFRS financial statements are based on two assumptions: that accounting is performed on an accrual (not cash) basis, and that the organization is a going concern. Required IFRS statements include a balance sheet, an income statement, a statement of changes in equity or of recognized income or expense, a cash flow statement, and notes that summarize significant accounting policies.

Mapping IFRS Mandates

IFRS is currently required or permitted in more than 100 jurisdictions - including the European Union, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, and China. Many other countries are planning to embrace IFRS in the next few years. For example, public sector organizations in the United Kingdom will begin using IFRS in 2010. Canada will come on board in 2011, with Mexico joining in 2012.

In Japan, the IASB and the Accounting Standards Board of Japan (ASBJ) agreed on a process for converging Japanese GAAP with IFRS that will enable most companies to adopt IFRS in 2011. Korea recently announced a road map that will make IFRS mandatory for most companies by 2011.

The Taiwan Financial Supervisory Commission is expected to announce a road map to IFRS soon, with the standards likely to become mandatory between 2012 and 2014. Australia and New Zealand adopted national standards that they describe as IFRS equivalents. Hong Kong embraced national standards that are identical to IFRS in terms of recognition and measurement options.

India announced a plan to adopt IFRS, called the Indian Financial Reporting Standards, effective in 2011. In Malaysia, the government plans to bring the country's GAAP into full convergence with IFRS effective January 2012.

In China, approximately 150 companies are listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Permitted to use either IFRS or Hong Kong reporting standards, approximately half of these companies use IFRS. Singapore adopted IFRS essentially verbatim.

Defining Strategies for IFRS Deployment

Yet not all organizations adopt IFRS in the same way. Some countries - such as Canada and those in Europe - make a transition to the new standards. That is, they choose a date when IFRS replaces the local GAAP. Typically organizations that transition to the new standard produce financial reports in both GAAP and IFRS formats for a year or more. Companies must use extensive narrative to explain the differences between the two types of reports submitted during this period.

The second approach to IFRS adoption is convergence, in which companies progressively replace local GAAP approaches with IFRS. Countries such as Japan, India, and China mandated a convergence approach to IFRS . Companies that converge on IFRS evolve their reporting methods over a prescribed period of time, which can be less difficult than making a rapid transition to the new standard.

Comparing IFRS Principles with GAAP Rules

In North America, IFRS is a work in process. Canada mandated the use of IFRS beginning in 2011. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has already begun accepting IFRS-based filings from foreign issuers, but no decision has been made requiring companies to adopt IFRS. Depending on rulings from the SEC, U.S. adoption may begin in 2014, assuming that certain milestones are met (see sidebar "Mandating IFRS in the United States").

Yet leading companies recognize the need to move toward IFRS adoption in advance of any mandate. Recently, Accenture surveyed senior finance and operations executives at large global companies in a variety of industries. When asked when they expect IFRS adoption to become a priority for their organizations, 64% of respondents indicated that they are or will be focused on IFRS within the next 12 months.

The timing may depend in part on the progress made in refining and aligning U.S. GAAP with IFRS . The two financial accounting systems are based on differing philosophies. U.S. GAAP is rules-based, meaning that requirements are specified explicitly and in great detail, creating a standard of more than 25,000 pages. Corporate executives rely on the rules of GAAP to make decisions and accurately report financial realities.

In contrast, IFRS is based on a clearly stated set of principles; consequently, the IFRS standards comprise only 2,500 pages. Yet the rigorous IFRS standards require careful attention, documentation, and comprehensive financial record keeping. In companies that adopt IFRS, the controller and auditor are responsible for interpreting and meeting the reporting requirements based on these principles.

Deploying IFRS requires careful consideration and planning, especially when you consider its effect on group financial reporting activities. By understanding the potential challenges that can complicate IFRS adoption and developing a comprehensive plan to overcome these challenges, you can increase your chances for a successful transition or convergence.

To understand how U.S. GAAP rules differ from IFRS principles, consider the example of a leased asset. The U.S. GAAP rule states that "the lease term is equal to 75% or more of the estimated economic life." However, the IFRS guidance says this about leasing: "The lease is for the major part of the economic life of the asset." With this in mind, a company using IFRS standards could interpret the lease to be 75%, 80%, or 95% of the estimated economic life of the asset.

Understanding IFRS Impact on Group Financial Reporting

The broad reach of IFRS touches many corporate systems, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise performance management (EPM) systems. The impact of the change is often most significant on financial systems, especially on group financial reporting practices.

Managing group close and local close activities - for corporate subsidiaries as well as individual business entities - can present new challenges during the transition to IFRS. Although these strategic and technical challenges are often unrecognized by CFO s, controllers, and other financial professionals, you can save your organization time, energy, and money by addressing them proactively.

Preparation and Planning
Overcoming IFRS Challenges to Group Financial Reporting

Deploying IFRS requires careful consideration and planning, especially when you consider its effect on group financial reporting activities. By understanding the potential challenges that can complicate IFRS adoption and developing a comprehensive plan to overcome these challenges, you can increase your chances for a successful transition or convergence.

Identifying Common Difficulties

For many organizations, IFRS requires more extensive, detailed disclosure in year-end reports and accounts than local GAAP reports. Furthermore, the financial reporting model can be both more complex and less understandable. Many reports require companies to create an exhaustive narrative that explains decisions, findings, and reporting choices. Some companies without previous exposure to IFRS reporting lack trained personnel to produce reports and narratives.

"One of the critical technology issues facing today's companies is how to best support their financial consolidation and reporting needs in order to achieve IFRS compliance."
Andrew Bray,
Technology Director,
PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

And when the numbers are crunched using IFRS , the results can be surprising. For example, an international manufacturer might blame losses on expenses related to an acquisition in another country. The parent company might use IFRS and report that most of the value of the subsidiary was wiped out on its balance sheet. The subsidiary, on the other hand, is using U.S. GAAP and reports a different conclusion.

Moreover, the transition from local GAAP reporting to IFRS can be costly. For example, after EU companies were mandated to adopt IFRS in 2005, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales estimated the first year transition costs as 0.05% of revenues for companies earning between €500 million and €5 billion. However, since IFRS is derivative of the accounting systems previously used by these companies, their cost may have been less than those of companies using other local GAAP rules, such as U.S. GAAP.

The U.S. SEC predicts that transition costs may be substantial for many companies. In the first year of the transition, according to SEC estimates, large companies can expect to spend between 0.125% and 0.13% of their revenue on the transition to IFRS - a potential cost of US$32 million per company.

Laying the Groundwork

Yet these difficulties are not inevitable. With proper preparation and expectations, your company can streamline the IFRS adoption process while delivering optimum results. Whether transitioning or converging on this standard, decision makers in your organization must be prepared to deal with the following issues.

Scope of Impact

Because IFRS is a standard for financial reporting, there is a widespread perception that its impact is limited to corporate accounting concerns. This assumption is incorrect.

The effects of IFRS are pervasive. Adopting this standard affects not just how you report your results but also how you run your business. And this impact is felt not just at your headquarters location, or wherever financial consolidation and planning is performed, but also throughout the enterprise. The choices you make and actions you take in every part of the business are affected by IFRS. Let's consider a few examples.

Asset Valuation
How you value assets differs dramatically from U.S. GAAP to IFRS. Under standard IAS 16, for example, you may need to track and account for property, plant, and equipment at a more disaggregated level than under U.S. GAAP. With greater disaggregation, you may decide to dispose of or retire certain assets earlier than usual when replacing portions of a larger asset group.

Inventory Costing
The LIFO inventory costing method is precluded by standard IAS 2. As a result, companies using LIFO under U.S. GAAP may experience significantly different operating results as well as cash flows under IFRS.

Derivatives
IFRS qualifies greater numbers of financial instruments as derivatives than U.S. GAAP. For example, IFRS considers option and forward agreements to buy unlisted equity investments to be derivatives.

Research and Development
Unlike U.S. GAAP, which charges all R & D costs as expenses when they are incurred, IFRS is more flexible. If specific criteria are met, companies filing under IFRS can declare R & D costs as an intangible asset - with the associated capitalization and amortization effects.

Personnel

Addressing the wide array of issues involved in adopting IFRS requires a cross-functional team, beginning with the support and participation of senior and executive management. People who should become part of the IFRS project team include the following:

• Management accountants - To make comparisons between actual and planning valuations, management accountants must examine the planning data and processes and adapt them for IFRS.
• Tax accountants - To address new confidentiality and tax audit issues, such as who has access to the data, tax accountants are needed to analyze these concerns and smooth the transition to IFRS.
• External auditors- To help understand the significant differences between existing practices and those needed to meet IFRS, external auditors can help companies understand to what degree a specific requirement applies to them or how the company's preferred treatment may be assessed under the new rules.
• IT department- To help make the system changes required by IFRS adoption, IT experts must manage system configuration, identify sources for accounting data, and determine how it will be compiled and computed.

Reporting

When you transition to IFRS, you cannot simply switch off local GAAP reporting at the close of one business day and turn on IFRS the next. Instead, you must support a transition period in which you produce parallel reports - complete financial reporting in both the GAAP and IFRS methods - without doubling the effort and cost of producing that documentation.

In the United States, the SEC will likely require that companies produce parallel reports for the two years prior to their adoption of IFRS. For example, if the standards are mandated for 2014, U.S. companies will need to produce reports in both IFRS and U.S. GAAP formats for 2012 and 2013. Public companies will also need to provide documentation that enables easy comparison, reconciliation, and explanation of differences between the GAAP and IFRS reports. This documentation may also require extensive narratives, disclosures, description of judgments made to support submitted reports, and explanations of any nonstandard approaches.

"The journal entries generated by the rules-based SAP BusinessObjects application provide an exact audit trail as we reconcile the data for both Canadian reporting purposes and IFRS standards. It makes it much easier to show both auditors and company management exactly what we've done."
Neil Thompson,
Manager of Financial Systems,
Standard Life

Transaction Recording

When making the transition to IFRS, you may need to change the way that your systems record business transactions. Extensive disclosure requirements, for example, may require you to capture additional data or record more detailed information in your transactional systems, such as the general ledger and its subsystems.

In the short term, work-arounds may be necessary to meet tight deadlines. When European companies prepared for the 2005 conversion to IFRS, they faced a short compliance time frame that drove the widespread use of "topside adjustments." These manual changes to the data helped companies meet the immediate need for group-level consolidation and reporting without changing the lower-level transactional systems. You may also want to use topsides in the early stages of IFRS adoption to help you meet your transition goals.

In the longer term, the need for topsides will diminish as IFRS requirements are more fully embedded into your supporting transactional systems. However, making the switch to IFRS may require changes to your transactional systems. For example, you may want to collect additional financial data needed to support an IFRS-compliant closing process without lengthening your corporate closing cycles or compromising accuracy. In some cases, meeting the transaction recording requirements of IFRS may warrant upgrades to the software and hardware that support your transactional systems.

Planning for Change

Effectively addressing these challenges requires more than just a working knowledge of IFRS financial rules and requirements. You must understand all of the issues involved in adopting IFRS, take the time to assess the impact of related changes, and find solutions that make the best use of people, processes, and technology.

By taking steps to create an effective transition methodology, you can help your company benefit from the adoption of IFRS. "Given the length of time taken to change an organization's people, processes, and technology, along with the global adoption governance issues, now is the time to assess the impacts of an IFRS transition and plan to embed IFRS accordingly into the day-to-day operations," says Bray of PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The next section describes the best practices that will help you control costs, understand and manage the scope of implementation, and create a smooth transition plan.

Critical Decision Points in IFRS Success
Using Technology to Enhance Compliance and Reduce Costs

As you prepare to adopt IFRS , you should weigh the following critical decision points in your planning. Understanding how these technology considerations can affect your group financial closing practices will help ensure that your processes and technologies support - rather than obstruct - your transition or convergence to IFRS.

Parallel Reporting

In the United States, experts expect the SEC to require companies to produce parallel financial reports for the two years prior to adopting IFRS. That is, if IFRS is mandated for all companies in 2014, organizations will need to produce reports in both U.S. GAAP and IFRS formats for both 2012 and 2013.

To streamline gathering the data that will support parallel reporting, you should store all data in a single location, with little or no duplication across your enterprise network. Having a single data source helps enhance data collection efficiency, improves data quality, and provides consistency across your reports.

To ensure that you can create the level of detail needed to support IFRS requirements, you also must be certain that your systems can meaningfully categorize this data. Reports will be more accurate, and you can achieve the desired transparency, if your systems can categorize data according to dimensionality, hierarchical views, structures, and currencies.

In addition, IFRS requires that you be able to segregate financial assets and liabilities, showing those that are listed and unlisted. You must also be able to analyze debtors and issuers for all securities. Finally, your systems must be able to identify all derivative instruments as well as types of hedging for derivative assets and liabilities.

Topside Adjustments

As you transition to IFRS, you may need to make topside adjustments to group-level reporting. To support this activity, you must ensure that your financial systems can perform complex calculations, execute and store multiple consolidations, and create reports in different formats. You must retain the data in your local GAAP formats until you have completed the transition to IFRS.

Your financial systems must also be able to perform topside adjustments automatically. Because many of these adjustments will be executed in large batches and will recur on a repeating basis, using your financial systems to execute them automatically will save you time and effort while you make the switch to IFRS.

Finally, the systems must be able to provide a comprehensive audit trail for topside adjustments, including all IFRS consolidation adjustments. Being able to perform a reconciliation between the historical (local) GAAP and IFRS during the transition period is essential. Ideally, this auditing functionality should be built into your system, not offered as an add-on for your financial consolidation application.

Change-Enabling Technology

To support group financial reporting activities during the adoption of IFRS, you must have technology that can readily adapt to change. For example, your systems should be able to easily process changes in your group structure, especially those related to acquisition and disposal of business entities as well as internal mergers. They should also reflect changes in interests, consolidation rates, and consolidation methods.

Financial users should be able to configure business rules in the system without relying on help from IT. Having this independence will help keep the system flexible without incurring unnecessary costs.

Keep in mind that new compliance rules require deeper documentation of consolidation processes than previously mandated. To meet these requirements, you also will need financial systems that support extensive reporting and documentation.

Disclosures and Commentary

A majority of European companies that converged on IFRS in 2005 reported that the new standards dramatically increased their reporting burden. Organizations required additional disclosures, an increased number of data sources, and new manual processes to cope with expanded reporting responsibilities.

As you face these disclosure and reporting requirements, take steps to assess whether your technology systems can support the new demands. Your group financial reporting solutions should allow you to add narrative information to financial values and data points in your reports. To support extended narratives or lengthy explanations, you also need financial systems that let you create secure contextual document attachments.

Report Writing

Beyond the need to produce reports in multiple formats during the transition phase, you must also create reconciliation reports that explain the differences between your local GAAP and IFRS results. The formats for IFRS reporting differ from those required to meet local GAAP requirements. For example, the section on cash flow statements (IAS 7) does not require you to reconcile net cash flow to movement in net debt, as U.S. GAAP does. Your financial systems must recognize such differences automatically and address them accordingly in each report.

To simplify report writing during the transition phase, your financial systems should be able to honor different naming conventions to meet both IFRS requirements and local GAAP specifications - in a single account. For example, IFRS IAS 1 requires different balance-sheet headings than those used under local GAAP. In IFRS, "Stock" is used instead of "Inventories" and "Fixed Assets" replaces the GAAP heading "Property, Plant, and Equipment."

Moving forward, your company will benefit by having flexible and powerful end-user reporting functionality. Such features can allow the headquarters consolidation team to create, modify, and amend their own reports - without IT assistance

Integrated Source Systems

Integration between your EPM applications and your transactional systems is essential. As you transition your source systems to IFRS, this integration provides flexibility and the ability to adapt to change.

Depending on your business structure and supporting IT infrastructure, it may not be possible to use a single-instance ERP or general ledger system. However, if you can avoid using flat files and performing manual data entry, your IFRS transition will progress more smoothly.

The most efficient integration approach is to establish direct links between EPM and transactional systems. These links will help you speed the data-loading process and avoid costly data errors. Software that provides direct links between EPM and ERP systems will also enable finance users to access and load information from source systems, and facilitate compliance reporting as well. Look for systems that allow business users to map metadata between source systems and EPM systems, drill back to the data's point of origin, and access a full audit trail.

XBRL

The U.S. SEC recently mandated the use of the interactive data-tagging language eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) for filing financial results (see table). Under this mandate, companies must use XBRL to create their income and cash flow statements as well as their balance sheets. XBRL can help make financial statements easier to search and compare, making corporate information more transparent.

Many experts believe that XBRL will help companies simplify their transition or convergence to IFRS. To enhance your transition to IFRS, you should consider how XBRL fits into your reporting processes today. With this understanding, you can begin to assess how your current reporting processes may be affected by the adoption of IFRS. You can determine what types of system support are required for your transition and identify an XBRL solution that will support your reporting needs for the long term.

Automated Internal Control Processes

The transition or convergence to IFRS will introduce a host of new processes, complexities, and reporting requirements. To prepare for this change, you must evaluate your current systems and control processes to determine whether they will be able to support your business while complying with IFRS .

For example, your current control processes and system may be effective in the existing environment. But how well will they serve the business under IFRS? Will they be robust enough to comply with the new requirements? Can they provide automated controls processes so that you can optimize operational efficiency and meet your compliance mandates in a timely, cost-effective manner?

Solutions from SAP
Choosing the Best Approach

To cope with the systemic demands that IFRS will impose, companies must prepare their infrastructures for this change. When choosing software and solutions to help streamline and simplify your transition to IFRS, look to SAP. SAP offers a complete IFRS solution, providing a wide range of software and services that address the entire IFRS adoption process. The software already meets the new requirements - and SAP delivers the tools, training, and consulting needed to identify risks, threats, and opportunities related to these regulations, thereby easing the burdens of the transition.

Solutions from SAP can enable a smooth, phased transition or convergence to IFRS. SAP provides a unified technology approach based on the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform, which supports all major architectures. In addition, the SAP® ERP Financials solution supports a broad variety of consolidation and business combination methods compatible with IFRS. What's more, SAP BusinessObjects^TM EPM solutions cover the full lifecycle of financial management, putting you in control of performance.

SAP has an installed base of customers that are already IFRS compliant. Hundreds of SAP customers worldwide are using the financial consolidation and reporting features of SAP BusinessObjects solutions for IFRS reporting. In addition, thousands of customers have implemented general ledger software, and many of those have already transitioned from local GAAP to IFRS.

Smoothing the Path to IFRS with SAP BusinessObjects Software

SAP BusinessObjects software provides comprehensive support for your transition to IFRS. SAP BusinessObjects EPM solutions for finance and SAP BusinessObjects governance, risk, and compliance solutions help integrate enterprise data and processes, delivering insight to align business strategies better and achieve financial excellence. Within this portfolio of solutions, you may want to consider the following applications as part of your IFRS adoption process:

• SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation application - This application helps financial users accurately assess, measure, and analyze the impact of various adoption methods and understand their impact on the balance sheet and income statement. SAP also offers a starter kit for IFRS for this application.
• SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation application - This application helps you recover critical time in your closing and management reporting cycles, without sacrificing any of the controls or auditing needed for today's global compliance environment. SAP also offers a starter kit for IFRS for this application.
• SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management application - This application provides powerful functionality so financial professionals can manage the process of accessing, mapping, and loading information from source systems to the SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation application.
• SAP BusinessObjects Intercompany application - This application helps business units reconcile intercompany balances in real time, eliminating extra work and delays at the corporate and divisional levels and improving the speed and accuracy of the closing process.
• SAP BusinessObjects Process Control application - This application helps ensure compliance by centrally monitoring internal controls across the enterprise and providing automated control testing, improved data visibility, continuous monitoring, and fast remediation.
• SAP BusinessObjects XBRL Publishing application by UBmatrix - This application lets you pull data from SAP Business Suite software and SAP BusinessObjects EPM applications into ready-made XBRL documents, which you can use for reviewing, analyzing, and preparing financial data.

IFRS Features

To help you address the critical decision points of IFRS planning, SAP BusinessObjects applications provide:

• Parallel reporting features
• Support for topside adjustments
• A rules-based environment
• Features that enable disclosures and commentary
• Flexible and powerful reporting
• XBRL publishing functionality

IFRS Starter Kits

SAP offers starter kits for EPM consolidation solutions that help you streamline the installation and exploit the full potential of these applications. For example, starter kits deliver business logic that resides on top of the SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation and SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation applications, among others. These starter kits help you reduce software implementation times, maximize compliance, and comprehensively address your company's business requirements with minimum cost and effort.

Starter kits also provide preconfigured IFRS-compliant content, which can help you speed and smooth the transition process to IFRS . Starter kits can include prebuilt input documents, rules, control reports, and financial statements. This content can help you get your SAP application up and running quickly, with minimal customization effort.

In addition, the starter kits enable rapid, trusted legal compliance. Built by an SAP team of experts with hands-on IFRS adoption experience, the starter kits incorporate their expertise and support best practices. The starter kits also provide detailed process guidance for business users, defining the steps needed to execute data collection, consolidation, and documentation processes.

What's more, starter kits provide comprehensive support for your specific IFRS financial operations and business requirements. Using preconfigured rules, controls, and calculations for IFRS and GAAP, the starter kits support consolidation activities and provide data consistency.

Compliance Support

To cope with the changes that IFRS adoption brings, you need a reliable, transparent, and repeatable financial information management process. To meet this need, SAP offers SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management, which can help you maximize productivity, achieve transparency, minimize the cost of compliance, and increase overall confidence in financial results.

With this solution, you can enable finance users to access and load information from source systems so everyone works with trusted data - while simultaneously facilitating compliance reporting. SAP BusinessObjects software also supports documentation production, automated testing, and reporting of internal controls in accordance with sections 302 and 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Source System Integration

SAP offers EPM applications for finance that can provide a comprehensive solution for IFRS . The applications cover the full lifecycle of financial management - and put you in control of performance. Comprising best-of-breed functionality, the applications integrate enterprise data and processes to streamline traditional finance processes. You can gain strategic insight for calculated decision making and confidently rely on your legal and management reporting.

SAP Business Suite software, the SAP ERP application, and the SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse component are all integrated with SAP BusinessObjects solutions for EPM as well as governance, risk, and compliance. These integrated solutions provide you with flexibility and the ability to adapt to change as you transition to IFRS.

Yet SAP BusinessObjects applications remain heterogeneous, and they can use data from non-SAP applications. As a result, you can use legacy financial and reporting applications to support your IFRS goals within the SAP software environment.

The Experience You Need

SAP BusinessObjects software has helped hundreds of customers around the world with their adoption of IFRS. For example, our customers have reported reducing reporting time from 20 work days to as little as 5 work days, with consolidation time reduced from 12 to 2 days.

"The journal entries generated by the rules-based SAP BusinessObjects application provide an exact audit trail as we reconcile the data for both Canadian reporting purposes and IFRS standards," says Neil Thompson, manager of financial systems at Standard Life in Canada. "It makes it much easier to show both auditors and company management exactly what we've done."

Unparalleled Opportunity
Getting Started with IFRS

If adopting IFRS is in your company's future, your mission is clear. You must drive your company's transition by understanding the related issues, assessing the impact of change, and finding solutions to the challenges that IFRS adoption presents.

"Don't underestimate how long all of this takes," says Bray of PricewaterhouseCoopers. "If you want to get it right, this is the time to determine specifically how IFRS will impact your company and to start planning and executing your strategy accordingly."

Now is the time to begin treating the IFRS transition as an opportunity rather than just a mandate. With careful planning and thoughtful execution, you can use IFRS adoption as a chance to review and improve your financial consolidation and reporting systems and enable rapid legal compliance.

For more information on how SAP BusinessObjects EPM solutions can help you support your transition to IFRS , contact your local SAP representative or visit us on the Web at www.sap.com/epm.