Jaipuria Institute of Management, Noida recently hosted a lecture on International Finance Reporting Standards (IFRS) by Gulshan Kalra, an established Chartered Accountant. The lecture was targeted at all finance students of the institute and consisted of a sharing of learning as well as a question-answer session pertaining to IFRS.
IFRS are a set of accounting standards developed by the International Accounting Standards Boards (IASB) that is becoming the global standard for the preparation of public company financial statements. In other words, if one wants to compare two countries, then you have to bring both the countries onto a certain standard, and that standard is IFRS.
IASB had 15 members, but the count has increased to 16 in 2012. The members are from diverse countries, including the UK. The information shared by Kalra was invaluable for the students. He helped the students understand that finance is about the representation of facts. Even companies that earn the same amount of profit show their balance sheets in different ways through LIFO (Last In First out) or FIFO (First In First Out), and that representation of facts can be learnt through experience; it is never taught using any book of accounting!
Several terms that were unknown to the students came up during discussions, such as Hyper Inflation, LIBOR & MIBOR, Finance Lease and Operating Lease. “Gulshan Sir helped us understand these terms but a major source of excitement was the fact that we knew about some important concepts and terms like NSE and BSE and could talk to him about them in detail,” shared Geetika Goyal, the campus journalist.
She also listed the key learning from the lecture:
Even though USA is a developed nation, it is not registered under IFRS. It plans to change its standards by 2014. The US is still using the US gap.
There are three phases of IFRS. India is in its 1st phase of using IFRS. The second phase will start from April 1, 2013 and the 3rd phase will start a year later.
IFRS includes Existing International Accounting Standards (IAS) + IFRS
Kalra later touched upon the softer aspects of finance saying, “There is tremendous growth in the sector that will only increase with the development of the economy. What a student really needs to excel in this field is a love for numbers!” He advised the students to try and experience real-life scenarios to understand finance. The concepts, he said, can only be understood with case studies and by visiting organisations to see how they resolve the issues around finance.