AYB200 Financial Accounting

You work for the Brisbane office of a firm of public accountants who have a number of clients who have some concerns regarding the IASB’s Revenue Recognition project. Revenue is an important number for financial statement users to assess a company’s performance and sustainability. The IASB and the FASB are currently working together to develop a new standard for recognising revenue from contracts with customers. While the partners have been able to communicate with clients about this issue, they have asked you to prepare a background report for presentation to other staff to outline:

– a concise history of Australia’s policy for accounting for revenue from contracts with customers before the adoption of IFRS;

– the approach taken by Australian IFRS on the question of recognising revenue from contracts with customers, and the reasoning behind this approach;

– future global developments relating to changing the IASB’s current accounting standard for recognising revenue from contracts with customers and how they might affect Australian reporting entities.

The partners require that the report is presented in simple language and in an interesting, easy-to-read format.

 

Requirements:

The report is to have a maximum word length of 1,000 words, excluding the one-page executive summary, appendices, and reference list. The Report will consist of a cover page, which shows the title of the report and the author, a table of contents, a one-page executive summary, the report itself, a page of references and any appendices. It is required to be prepared in 1.5 line spacing, using a Times New Roman 12 point font, with 2 cm margins on all sides. You are required to cite at least ten (10) current sources which should include items from all of the following categories: academic literature, media, and websites. Since the firm wants to maintain its high reputation, it is vital that the sources used are reliable, reputable, and relevant, cited in an accurate manner and properly referenced using the Harvard method.

 

Content Resources:

 Where to start (Note: you must use sources from each of these three groups of resources):

Academic literature:

 Academic journals accessed through the QUT library catalogue. You can start your search on Google Scholar for these articles. If the full text is not available through Google Scholar, you can use the library catalogue to access it as QUT has subscriptions to most Accounting journals. Some journals you may find useful are Australian Accounting Review and Abacus (available online through QUT Library)

Media:

 Financial media, e.g. Business Review Weekly, The Financial Review (available online through QUT library databases).

Websites:

 Publications of professional accounting bodies:  In the Black (CPA

Australia); Charter (ICAA) (available online through QUT Library)

 Websites of accounting standard setters and other regulators, especially

AASB, IASB, IFRS (www.ifrs.org)

 Websites of Australian professional accounting bodies:  CPA Australia,

Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia (ICAA), Institute of Public Accountants (IPA).

 Websites of regional and national standard-setting bodies

(http://www.ifrs.org/The+organisation/Advisory+bodies/standard_setting_bodies.htm)

 Deloitte’s IAS Plus website: http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm

 Websites of international accounting firms, e.g. Deloitte, Ernst & Young,

KPMG, PwC.