Our Guides to financial statements help you to prepare financial statements in accordance with IFRS. They are compliance focused and illustrate one possible format for financial statements prepared under IFRS.

Our guides for banks are based on a fictitious banking group involved in a range of general banking activities, which is not a first-time adopter of IFRS. This edition shows illustrative disclosures under IAS 39 Financial Instruments: Recognition and Measurement. It reflects standards in issue at 31 December 2016 that are required to be applied by an entity with an annual period beginning on 1 January 2016. It also provides expanded pre-implementation disclosures on the impact of the adoption of IFRS 9.

Our guide illustrating early application of IFRS 9 Financial Instruments is also available.

These guides should not be used as boiler plate templates. The preparation of your own financial statements requires judgement, in terms of the choice of accounting policies, how the disclosures should be tailored to reflect your specific circumstances, and the materiality of disclosures in the context of your organisation.

Compliance with the standards is a given for investors, but there is a bigger question that needs to be asked: are your financial statements simply a compliance exercise, or have you taken the opportunity to maximise their value to investors? After all, if the statements have to be prepared anyway, then it makes sense to get maximum mileage from your efforts.

As a starting point, ask yourself these simple questions.

1. Does the most important information have prominence in my financial statements?
2. Are my disclosures clear, including eliminating immaterial disclosures that obscure key messages?
3. Is my messaging in the financial statements aligned with other published information, such as the management report and earnings releases?

We suspect that you will implicitly know the answers to these questions, so the only question left is how you can make your reporting better? To begin answering that question, visit our Better business reporting website.