How Do You Make Yourself Important to Your Banker?

Most bankers do not take the time to stay current on accounting issues like XBRL and IFRS. Adoption of both XBRL and IFRS will have major implications on financial statement reporting, and bankers have to understand the changes.

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) requires a standard format for all financial statements, so tags are used to map individual general ledger accounts to the pre-determined format.

IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standard) accounting rules represent a generally uniform global approach to capitalization, revenue, and expense recognition. The Securities and Exchange Commission recently reaffirmed its commitment to a convergence of US GAAP to IFRS [1].

Commit yourself to learning the accounting issues that your banker needs to know. Offer to provide the information to your banker as a professional courtesy. I can tell you from experience, the benefits can be well worth the effort.

For a more in-depth discussion of how to be more important to your banker, see the following profile from Cfo.Com:
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/13131183/1/c_13131494?f=home_todayinfinance


Footnote:

[1] http://blog.ifrs.com/2009/09/sec-breaks-silence-on-ifrs.html