Allister Wilson, United Kingdom senior technical partner and director of accounting at Ernst & Young, stressed the urgency at an International Accounting Standards Committee conference, A Single Market in European Accounting in Brussels.

The changes to a company's consolidated financial statements are all-pervasive, affecting the balance sheet, income statement and disclosures. Companies must be decisive in determining the date of their first IAS-based accounts, and stick to it. They have to decide whether they want a progressive application, one-time change to IAS or restatement of prior years. They also need to consider whether the IASs used should be U.S. GAAP-compliant where possible. Wilson said that any company that might be considering a U.S. listing in the future would be foolish not to adopt this policy.

Time was also needed to change a company's accounting culture. The conversion process will require aligning internal and external reporting; buying in top management support; adapting information technology systems; changing treasury systems; and training financial reporting staff.

However, the eventual savings to a company of reporting under a single accounting framework are huge. Hoffman La Roche calculated that it could save SFr10m a year, while Dutch financial services company ING, which operates in heavily regulated areas in 100 countries, has recently assessed it could save €0.25bn annually.

Tom Jones, IASC chairman, commented on the watershed effect of the EC's acceptance of IAS, which along with the U.S. taking IAS seriously for the first time, had made people realize that global accounting standards were actually coming and that the practical issues of implementing them needed to be addressed.

"The chances of real success are very good now. Even two years ago I wasn't an optimist; but I am now. We have our issues in Europe and in the U.S., but when people have stopped fighting the war over whose standards are the best, consider the effect of all that energy being concentrated into developing one framework. It's a great time to be an accountant."

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