Handbook: Debt and equity financing
Handbooks | May 2025
Latest edition: Our in-depth guide to debt and equity financing, with our latest interpretations.
Using Q&As and examples, we provide interpretive guidance on debt and equity financings. This April 2025 edition incorporates our latest interpretations based on frequent questions we experience in practice.
Applicability
- All entities
Relevant dates
- Effective immediately
Complex instruments, complex literature
The array of accounting literature on financial instruments can be bewildering, and the varieties and complexities of modern financial instruments are sometimes staggering. Taken together, it’s not an exaggeration to say that accounting for debt and equity financing transactions can seem daunting.
Determining the right accounting can require you to maneuver through multiple standards and models just to arrive at the starting point. This Handbook uses roadmaps to navigate the different standards, explaining what guidance applies to what types of instruments. It provides an in-depth look at the broad and often complex issues related to the classification, measurement, presentation and disclosure of financing instruments. And it includes examples demonstrating how to apply the standards to some common financing transactions.
Report contents
- Roadmap to the guidance
- Debt
- TDRs, debt modifications and extinguishments
- Equity
- Distinguishing liabilities from equity
- SEC guidance on redeemable equity-classified instruments
- Contracts in an entity’s own equity
- Hybrid instruments with embedded features
- Convertible instruments
- Comprehensive examples
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