The IFRS 18 Implementation Playbook

How to Lead the Project, Align the Business and Avoid Rework

Written by an experienced project and product manager who has built financial-reporting products from the ground up—and is also a CPA.

IFRS 18 applies to annual reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027. For a calendar-year company, that sounds like a financial-reporting deadline.

It is not the first deadline that matters.

The project may need to influence the annual budget before 2027, change how transactions are recorded from 1 January 2027, revise monthly management reporting, prepare comparative information for the first interim report, and culminate in the first complete annual financial statements in early 2028.

That makes IFRS 18 more than an accounting-policy exercise. It is a long-running, cross-functional project connecting financial reporting, investor communication, management planning, group performance management and information systems.

I approach that problem as both a CPA and someone who has spent years working as a project manager and product manager.

The starting point is not a list of technical accounting questions. It is the purpose of the project, the sequence of decisions and the governance structure needed to deliver it.

Start with the medium-term management plan

The first step is not classifying income and expenses into operating, investing and financing categories. It is aligning the project with the company’s medium-term management plan—or equivalent strategic plan.

If IFRS 18 is presented internally as nothing more than mandatory compliance, other departments have little reason to prioritise it. Finance may struggle to obtain resources and data. The work then falls back on a small number of accounting staff, who carry the implementation burden and compensate for missing processes with manual work.

Even when such a project succeeds, the outcome may be perceived simply as “meeting the new requirement.” Much of the work remains invisible, and the people who delivered it may receive little organisational recognition.

A stronger project purpose is to connect the way the company plans, manages and explains performance:

• the medium-term management plan;

• management-defined performance measures (MPMs);

• annual budgets and forecasts;

• internal KPIs;

• the accounts, data attributes and mapping rules required under IFRS 18;

• monthly and quarterly management reporting;

• investor communications; and

• IFRS financial statements.

This does not mean every internal KPI must become an MPM or that management reporting must be identical to external reporting. It means the differences should be intentional, explainable and manageable.

Otherwise, a company can enter 2027 with a budget based on one definition of performance, manage the year using another and report the result to investors using a third.

Build the right team at kickoff

Unlike many accounting-standard implementation projects, IFRS 18 cannot be owned by accounting alone.

MPMs are closely connected with how management communicates performance publicly. Investor Relations understands the measures used to explain the company to investors. Corporate Planning connects those measures to strategy, budgets and management actions. Finance must translate them into IFRS-compliant definitions, reconciliations, tax and non-controlling-interest effects, disclosures and audit trails.

Systems specialists also need to participate from an early stage. IFRS 18 can require new accounts, new classification attributes, changes to consolidation packages and reconstruction of comparative data. Whether the required information can actually be produced is part of the accounting project—not a question to leave until accounting conclusions have been finalised.

The organisation chart is not an administrative formality. It should show who owns the performance narrative, who translates it into plans and KPIs, who makes it auditable and who can make decisions when those objectives conflict.

Assign roles, not meeting invitations

Inviting someone to the project is not the same as assigning that person a role.

Each participant should understand:

• what the project expects them to decide;

• what information they must provide;

• what deliverable they own;

• when their contribution is required;

• which meetings they need to attend; and

• where unresolved matters will be escalated.

For example, asking “someone from IR” to join the project is too vague. A useful assignment would be to identify the performance measures used in public communications, assess which may be MPMs and explain the potential effect of changing their definitions.

The same principle applies to meetings. A person should normally attend because they will make a decision, provide necessary information, perform work or implement the outcome. Other stakeholders can be kept informed through shared reporting.

Without this discipline, cross-functional involvement can quickly create large meetings in which everyone is informed but no one is accountable.

There is one important exception. The roles of the PM and PMO should not be constrained by rigid functional boundaries. Their responsibility is to ensure that nothing essential to the project’s success is left unattended—including identifying ownership gaps, connecting workstreams, following up on unresolved matters and stepping in temporarily when a critical task falls between functions.

Everyone else should know exactly what they own. The PM and PMO should ensure that nothing remains unowned.

The effective date is not the first project deadline

IFRS 18 Appendix C requires retrospective application, including reconciliations for first-year annual reporting and applicable interim periods.

For a calendar-year company, the implementation schedule therefore needs to combine three calendars:

The earliest deadline may be the date on which budget guidance and performance KPIs are issued—not the date of the first IFRS 18 financial statements.

Align MPMs and KPIs before budgeting

Under an ideal management-and-statutory alignment approach, the company would identify its expected MPMs before preparing the 2027 budget. It would also restate relevant historical results under IFRS 18 so that the new budget begins from a comparable baseline.

The ideal sequence would be:

1. Confirm the medium-term strategy and management view of performance.

2. Identify expected MPMs.

3. Map internal KPIs to those MPMs.

4. Restate relevant 2026 results under IFRS 18.

5. Prepare the 2027 budget using the restated baseline.

6. Capture 2027 actuals using the same definitions.

7. Connect management reporting, investor communication and financial reporting.

Completing all of this before budgeting may be difficult. At a minimum, management should understand how the new-year KPIs relate to expected MPMs before approving the budget.

Questions include:

• Does budgeted operating profit use the same boundary as IFRS 18 operating profit?

• Which items are excluded from management KPIs, and will the same items be excluded from an MPM?

• Can actual KPI performance be reproduced from the financial-reporting data?

• Will the definitions used for budgets, forecasts, monthly results and investor communications remain consistent?

These questions affect management decisions, not only financial-statement presentation.

Extend the decision to subsidiary KPIs

For a group, KPI and MPM alignment does not stop at the parent company.

If subsidiaries are assessed using entity-level KPIs, changes need to be explained before they prepare their budgets. Subsidiary management needs to know not only what additional data to submit, but also whether the measures used to evaluate performance will change.

The group may need to communicate:

• the KPI definition and calculation method;

• its relationship with group MPMs;

• included and excluded items;

• treatment of foreign exchange, allocations and intragroup transactions;

• the boundary between subsidiary-level results and consolidation adjustments;

• revised budget and monthly-reporting requirements; and

• any effect on performance evaluation or remuneration.

The practical chain is:

Group MPM → Group KPI → Subsidiary KPI → Subsidiary budget → Monthly actuals → Consolidated reporting

The first group-wide IFRS 18 deadline may therefore be the date on which budget instructions and performance KPIs are issued to subsidiaries.

Decide what must change from 1 January 2027

The company must identify information that needs to be captured prospectively from the beginning of the year.

Possible examples include:

• classification attributes for operating, investing and financing;

• activity-level classification of foreign exchange differences;

• function and nature information;

• new accounts or subaccounts;

• revised consolidation-package fields;

• MPM adjustments and related tax and NCI information; and

• additional cash-flow information.

Not every item needs to be captured at individual journal-entry level. The project should determine the appropriate data layer for each requirement—source transaction, account, reporting attribute, consolidation package or consolidation adjustment. The critical point is to identify before 2027 which information cannot be reconstructed reliably after the event.

If the company wants to avoid having to trace, reclassify or reconstruct transactions from the beginning of the year, the necessary posting logic, reporting attributes and source-data requirements need to be decided before the first relevant transactions of 2027 are recorded.

This is why the systems team should not be brought in only after all accounting decisions have been made. The accounting design and the feasible data design need to develop together.

Restate 2026 progressively

For projects beginning in the second half of 2026, part of the comparative period has already closed. Q1 and H1 data may therefore already be finalised.

Those closed periods can be restated while the underlying records, explanations and responsible personnel are readily available.

This progressive approach has three advantages:

• it identifies missing historical data early;

• it tests the 2027 accounting and system design using real data; and

• it separates comparative-data reconstruction from the first-year reporting workload.

The comparative restatement therefore becomes both a transition requirement and a project prototype.

Choose when to change the consolidation package

The consolidation-package start date should follow the group's management-reporting cadence, not only its statutory reporting calendar.

If management reviews consolidated performance monthly, the IFRS 18-ready package should ideally be used from January. Otherwise, the first months may be managed using one reporting structure and later reported using another. Monthly trends, budget variances, margins and turnover-period analysis can lose continuity.

If the group does not prepare monthly consolidated management information, changing the package for Q1 or H1 may be reasonable.

However, the package-submission date and the underlying data-capture date are not necessarily the same. Even if the package changes at Q1 or H1, information that cannot be reconstructed later may still need to be recorded from 1 January.

Plan each reporting milestone

For a calendar-year company, the implementation journey can run from kickoff until the first annual IFRS 18 reporting process is completed in early 2028.

Whether quarterly information is published—and whether it is audited, reviewed or unassured—depends on the jurisdiction, listing market and form of reporting. Half-year reporting is a major milestone in many markets. The annual close then adds the complete set of IFRS 18 disclosures and is likely to be the largest final workload peak.

The annual disclosure design should therefore be tested before year-end rather than left until the first annual close.

Manage the project through issues, not perfect foresight

The project team does not need to resolve every detailed accounting question before kickoff.

New questions will arise as real transactions, systems and comparative data are analysed. That is normal. What matters is having a process that ensures each important question is resolved before it delays a dependent task.

An issue register should include at least:

Manage detailed issue analysis on a separate page or in a separate document. However, ensure that the latest version can always be accessed directly from the issue register. Avoid any situation in which the team cannot identify the current authoritative document.

The owner and the contributors should not be confused. One person should be accountable for resolving the issue, even when several specialists perform the analysis.

Establish the PM, PMO and escalation route

IFRS 18 implementation needs an integrated schedule, disciplined issue management and a defined escalation route. A PM or PMO should maintain these throughout the project.

The project itself continues throughout the month. Workstreams resolve issues, update deliverables and raise decision requests as they arise; they do not wait for the monthly governance meetings.

The recurring meeting cadence should instead be designed from the company’s existing decision calendar. Once the dates of the relevant management or board meetings are known, the steering committee can be scheduled approximately one week before each of them.

At that monthly checkpoint, the steering committee reviews the current issue register, organises matters requiring executive attention and determines which items should be submitted to the following management or board meeting. The PM or PMO then prepares the necessary decision materials and maintains the escalation trail.

Because IFRS 18 implementation can continue until the first annual reporting process is completed in early 2028, these recurring governance dates should be scheduled across the full project horizon—not arranged one meeting at a time.

Meeting dates should follow the decision calendar.

One practical technique—although its effectiveness may vary by country and corporate culture—is to combine the project kickoff and major three- or six-month milestones with an informal social gathering outside normal project work.

In my experience, this can be surprisingly effective. It helps participants build relationships across functions, creates space for conversations that may not occur in formal meetings and reinforces the sense that the project is a shared undertaking rather than an accounting exercise.

Create one shared source of truth

The organisation chart, integrated schedule, issue register, decisions and progress should not live in one person's inbox or private spreadsheet.

They should be maintained in a shared workspace in which authorised project participants can access the latest information without asking a particular individual to send it.

The specific tool will differ by company. The important principles are:

• one recognised source of current information;

• clear owners and due dates;

• visible status and dependencies;

• traceable decisions and changes;

• access for the people who need it; and

• appropriate controls over confidential information.

Progress updates can be shared through this workspace. Meetings should then focus on decisions, exceptions and blocked work—not on reading status reports aloud.

There are many useful tools and countless ways to automate updates—including through AI—and teams should use them where they help.

But the tool itself is not the point. What matters is maintaining one simple, trusted source of current information throughout the project. Whatever technology the company chooses, the PM and PMO should remain focused on keeping that source complete, current and authoritative.

The project discipline matters more than knowing every answer on day one

The fundamentals of the project are straightforward:

1. Define the purpose.

2. Establish the team and each person's expected role.

3. Build the integrated schedule from the earliest business and reporting deadlines.

4. Record each issue, owner, due date and escalation route.

5. Make decisions through the appropriate governance forum.

6. Communicate and implement those decisions.

7. Review the result and update the plan—the project's PDCA cycle.

In the AI era, detailed accounting questions can be researched faster than before. AI can help locate requirements, compare interpretations and structure analysis. Professional judgement, verification and appropriate approval remain necessary.

But AI cannot decide the company's purpose, assign accountability, secure cross-functional cooperation, choose acceptable trade-offs or establish its decision rights. Those are project-management responsibilities.

You do not need every answer before kickoff. You need a system that ensures every important question will be answered before it becomes a delay.

Put the approach into practice

The principles in this article are straightforward. Applying them across accounting, planning, systems, investor communications and group reporting—without overlooking a critical dependency—is considerably harder.

To support that work, IFRS-LABO has developed the IFRS 18 Project Launch Package: a practical Excel toolkit designed to help teams launch and manage an IFRS 18 implementation project from the initial assessment through the first reporting cycle.

At its core is a comprehensive readiness checklist covering both project-management considerations and the detailed IFRS 18 matters that implementation teams need to assess. The package also includes practical templates for:

• defining the project organisation and individual responsibilities;

• building an integrated master schedule;

• managing issues, owners, deadlines and decisions;

• planning steering committee meetings around the corporate decision calendar;

• mapping the path to interim and annual reporting; and

• tracking the deliverables the project must produce.

Together, these tools help the project team understand what has been completed, what remains unresolved, who needs to be involved and which matters may affect budgets, systems, comparative information, disclosures or the first reporting cycle. Relevant IFRS references and links to supporting IFRS-LABO articles are included to make further research easier.

The package is not a substitute for company-specific analysis or professional judgement. It is a paid practical resource intended to provide a structured starting point, reduce avoidable omissions and turn IFRS 18 requirements into work that can be assigned, scheduled, monitored and escalated.

If you are preparing to launch an IFRS 18 implementation project, use the package as the project team’s initial working structure—and adapt it to your organisation, reporting calendar and governance process.

[Get the IFRS 18 Project Launch Package ]

Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute accounting, audit, legal or other professional advice. IFRS 18 implementation requirements and assurance obligations should be assessed based on each entity's facts, reporting framework, jurisdiction and listing rules.