I seem to be incurring some personal IFRS compliance costs: the amount of time I spend reading through IFRS-related content is consuming more and more of my week with each passing month.

I referred readers to this Accenture survey several postings ago, and I want to point out a few other informational nuggets contained in the report.

Here they are:

• More pain for the little guys: The anticipated conversion spending by large companies is (for my money) fairly high; however, many smaller companies expect to spend a greater portion of their revenue on compliance. Companies with $20 billion to $49.9 billion in annual revenue project spending an average of $131.9 million. Companies with revenues north of $50 billion expect to spend an average of $160.9 million.

• Other percentage-of-revenue differences: In Europe, companies spent an average of 0.05 percent of revenue; in the United States, the SEC road map indicates that companies can expect to spend 0.12 percent of revenue. However, survey respondents expect to spend 0.2 percent of revenue on IFRS conversion (nearly twice as much as the SEC projects).

• Greater details on synergies: As I mentioned before, the survey indicates that a (surprising and encouraging) number of finance executives plan to make significant improvements within their functions as a result of the conversion. Fifty-one percent of respondents say they will seek cost savings by integrating the conversion with other interdependent initiatives to mitigate costs, enhance and track performance, and maximize the longer-term return on the IFRS investment. Additionally, 21 percent of respondents plan to integrate IFRS conversion with finance systems implementations, and 25 percent plan to combine with “finance transformation” projects. ###