On 28 May 2014, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) published IFRS 15 Revenue from Contracts with Customers. IFRS 15 sets out a single and comprehensive framework for revenue recognition, which supersedes (IAS 18 Revenue and IAS 11 Construction Contracts) and the accompanied Interpretations. In common with other recently issued IFRSs, IFRS 15 includes comprehensive application guidance and illustrative examples, together with a detailed section which sets out how the IASB reached its decisions about the new requirements (the Basis for Conclusions).
The new standard also introduces an overall disclosure objective together with significantly enhanced disclosure requirements for revenue recognition. These are accompanied by an explicit statement that immaterial information does not need to be disclosed and that the disclosure requirements should not be used as a checklist. In practice, even if the timing and profile of revenue recognition did not change, new and/or modified processes might have been needed in order to obtain the necessary information.
In this publication we update our previous guidance to discuss issues that companies have encountered in implementing IFRS 15 and include a number of new examples to demonstrate how the standard should be applied.