Accounting Best Practices, Fifth Edition

Implementation Issues for Financial Statements Best Practices

This section notes the relative level of implementation difficulty for all of the best practices that are discussed later in this chapter. The primary source of information is contained in Exhibit 12.1, which shows the cost and duration of implementation for each best practice. For this group of improvements, the table makes it clear that, in most cases, changes are of little duration, easy to implement, and have little or no cost. The reason is that most alterations are confined to a small number of people within the accounting department, which makes it easier to alter the tasks of just that small group. Also, these are mostly procedural changes, ones that do not require expensive and problematic computer programming alterations. Further, there is little need for the participation of other departments. Thus, for all these reasons, the risk and investment associated with most of these best practices are low.

Exhibit 12.1. Summary of Financial Statements Best Practices

	Best Practice	Cost	Install Time
Financial Reports
12–1	Move operating data to other reports
12–2	Post financial statements in an Excel PivotTable on the Internet
12–3	Restrict the level of reporting
12–4	Write financial statement footnotes in advance ...