IFRS 18 applies to annual reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027. That is the date on most slides, and it is the wrong one to plan against.
Application is retrospective. The comparative figures have to be presented in the new structure alongside the first IFRS 18 statements. For a calendar-year group, that comparative year is 2026 — the year you are closing now.
So the question is not what you will do in 2027. It is whether the numbers you are producing this year can come back out in a different shape.
What IFRS 18 does not change
It is worth narrowing this before widening it, because the name of a new standard tends to make finance teams brace for more than is actually coming.
IFRS 18 replaces IAS 1. It does not change how you recognise or measure revenue, leases or financial instruments. Your accounting policies in those areas stay where they are.
What changes are presentation and disclosure: how the result is structured, which subtotals are required, and how you explain the measures you already talk about publicly. That makes this a reporting-structure project rather than an accounting-policy one — and it lands on a different desk than most people assume.
What it does change
Three defined categories in the statement of profit or loss. Income and expenses are classified as operating, investing or financing. IAS 1 allowed near-total freedom here; IFRS 18 does not.
Mandatory subtotals. Operating profit, and profit before financing and income tax, become required rather than optional. If your P&L does not currently present them, or presents something adjacent under the same name, that is a decision to make rather than a label to change.
Enhanced aggregation and disaggregation. Line items have to be grouped and split on a principled basis, which in practice means your account hierarchies get read more closely than they have been.
Management-defined performance measures, in one reconciled note. This is the requirement most often underestimated. An MPM is a subtotal of income and expenses that is used in public communications outside the financial statements, communicates management's view of financial performance, and is not defined by IFRS. All three conditions must hold. Every MPM has to be disclosed in a single note and reconciled to the most directly comparable IFRS subtotal.
If your group publishes adjusted operating profit, or an underlying result, or a segment measure that appears in the results presentation but not in the statements, that is where this requirement bites.
Why FY2026 is the year that decides it
Restated comparatives mean the prior year has to be presentable in the new structure. For most groups that is 2026, and 2026 is closing now.
The risk of leaving it is not a penalty. It is discovering in the first quarter of 2027 that the prior year cannot be re-presented from the system — and rebuilding it by hand, in a spreadsheet, outside the close, in front of the auditor, during the busiest weeks of your year.
A group that has not looked at this yet is not late in any formal sense. It is simply working with less time than it thinks.
Where the work actually sits
Almost none of it is drafting.
Restructuring the P&L into three categories is a mapping exercise against your chart of accounts, and the interesting part is the lines that do not land cleanly in any of them. New mandatory subtotals mean new statement definitions. Aggregation and disaggregation requirements reach into hierarchy design. And the MPM note is a build — a linked note with calculated variables, reconciled to the statement it sits behind, rebuilt every period without anyone re-keying it.
In IBM Controller and IBM Planning Analytics, that is configuration work: creating accounts, re-mapping the chart-of-accounts, cube and hierarchy design, statement and report definitions. It is the same platform you already run.
A standard that changes how the statement is built cannot be satisfied by a version upgrade. The system holds the structure; someone still has to decide what the structure should be.
Things worth scoping together
Tagged filing. If you file in ESEF or another iXBRL regime, the taxonomy revisions carry the new categories and the dimensional modelling behind MPM reconciliations. Timing here is still forthcoming; what is not in doubt is that the filing changes as well as the statements.
Four things to do before you close FY2026
- Map your current P&L lines to the three categories. Find the ones that do not land cleanly. Those are your real decisions; the rest is mechanical.
- List every performance measure your group uses publicly — investor materials, results presentations, the annual report's front half — and test all three MPM conditions on each.
- Check whether last year can be re-presented from the system, not from a spreadsheet. This is the single question that tells you how much time you actually have.
- Ask your auditor what they expect to see in the FY2026 comparative. Now, not in March.
Where to start
We put the first three of those into a short checklist — twelve questions your FY2026 close either answers or does not. It is on the IFRS 18 page, along with what an Intito assessment looks at.
Intito is an IBM Business Partner working with finance teams across the Nordics and DACH on planning, consolidation and reporting. If you run IBM Controller or IBM Planning Analytics, the assessment happens on the platform you already have — we look at your structure, not at a product demonstration.