By: George M. Wilson & Carol A. Stacey

Now that year-end is over for most calendar-year companies the transition to the new revenue recognition standard is a major focus area. In recent weeks there have been two interesting sources of comment and information about this transition.

First, on March 21, 2017 Chief Accountant Wesley Bricker spoke before the Annual Life Sciences Accounting & Reporting Congress in Philadelphia. (If you are thinking “that sounds familiar”, it was at this same conference a year ago that former Chief Accountant Jim Schnurr made some serious comments about the use of non-GAAP measures that previewed the May C&DI’s!).

In his remarks, Mr. Bricker focused on the transition to the new revenue recognition standard, saying:

“Let me now turn to implementation of the new revenue standard.  This area deserves close attention, both to make sure that the standard is implemented appropriately and timely and to ask whether the appropriate transition disclosures are being made so that investors and other market participants have sufficient time to absorb the anticipated effects of the new standard.

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In the worrisome column, however, some companies need to make significant progress this year in their implementations.  In a survey of public companies released in October 2016, eight percent of respondents at that time had not started an initial assessment of the new revenue recognition standard, while an overwhelming majority of the others were still assessing the impact.

Particularly for companies where implementation is lagging, preparers, their audit committees and auditors should discuss the reasons why and provide informative disclosures to investors about the status so that investors can assess the implications of the information. Successful implementation requires companies to allocate sufficient resources and develop or engage appropriate financial reporting competencies.”

The second recent development is the release by Deloitte in a “Heads Up” newsletter in April 2017 of their most recent updated survey “Adopting the New Revenue Standard — Where Do Companies Stand?”

In the survey, Deloitte found that many companies that had originally contemplated using a full retrospective have moved more towards the modified retrospective method. And, along with the worries of the Chief Accountant above, they also found:

“Slightly more than half of respondents had started to implement the new standard, but most were in the very early phases of adoption.”

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome!