Viewpoint - IFRS 18: The impact for Reporting Agencies

At Reportl we work closely with reporting design agencies which help listed companies prepare and publish their annual report, simultaneously in a full range of published formats.

We are specialists in the last mile reporting challenges, the need for good planning and also the need for flexibility to be able to address surprises. For the companies and design teams we work with, forewarned is forearmed and it’s always good to share, communicate and talk about what’s coming to reporting in the years ahead. 

Something that lies ahead for all UK and European listed companies is IFRS 18. Each listed company will need to address it in a wave of implementation activity in 2028 that will take just twelve months to pass through.

IFRS 18 in focus

IFRS 18 - Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements changes the structure of profit and loss accounts, places more reporting discipline around management-defined-performance measures, provides clearer rules on aggregation and disaggregation and involves the introduction of required subtotals. The UK regulators endorsed IFRS 18 in late 2025 and it will be mandatory for 2027 calendar years, which means that for the first wave of listed companies with December year-ends, the first few months of 2028 have the potential to be ‘prime-time’ for IFRS 18 implementation.

We were interested to see that the large auditing firms have been busy preparing extensive guidance on IFRS 18, for example here and here and reading these through, IFRS 18 appears to have many moving parts. In our experience this type of guidance is prepared when audit firms view a change in standards or rules as being significant and pervasive. 

Regulators require retrospective implementation to cover 2026 comparative figures and audit firms are recommending early preparations and whilst some companies will do exactly that, others will prefer to make their preparations closer to the date of applicability.

The effect of IFRS 18 for reporting agencies

We expect that the changes in accounting disclosure requirements will affect reporting agencies’ work and we have identified six areas that have a common theme and, potentially, a common solution.

We expect that the arrival of IFRS 18 will mean:

• Changes to the results, trends, year-on-year comparisons, new numbers and new narratives explaining the effect of IFRS 18.
• Changes to the way the results are discussed, which in an age of Natural Language Processing will lead to the investment community assessing sentiment about the change using LLM tools.
• Within the financial statements themselves, new tables, changes to existing tables and new notes
• As the wave of implementation progresses, issuers looking at how those who have reported earlier have addressed IFRS 18 and perhaps making late refinements to their own disclosures based on what they are seeing others disclose.
• Audit-prompted adjustments relating to IFRS 18 where presentational changes need to be made as a result the auditor’s work
• New XBRL tags to be selected to match the changed disclosures and then reviewed

Each and any one of these can be comfortably taken in the stride of an experienced reporting agency team working proactively with their client. Take them all together and factor in the reality that IFRS 18 won’t be introduced in a vacuum, with listed companies making changes to their businesses, their strategies, their people and we expect early 2028 has the potential to be a challenging reporting season, particularly in the closing phases of preparing the annual report.

What can be done now?

It’s not too early for reporting agencies to be placing IFRS 18 on the agenda for discussion with their annual report clients. UK regulators have permitted early adoption and so enquiring about plans for implementation in 2026 annual reports is a good way to get IFRS 18 onto a client’s radar screen. 

For many, IFRS 18 will be a watching brief during the remainder of 2026 and it will be during the preparations for the 2027 annual report that things will step up a gear.

But there’s a potential response that is worth considering early. Digital-first reporting using Reportl for preparation of the annual report doesn’t only help create state-of-the-art reporting suites that make information more accessible for AI, it also de-pressurises the final phase of a reporting project. Reportl automates and streamlines many manual, error-prone activities, and brings forward tagging activities releasing time for more effective controls and checks. 

Reportl is ideal for the type of logistical reporting challenge we expect IFRS 18 to present and we would not only encourage agencies to suggest it to their clients, we’d love to help them do so.

If you would like to learn more, please reach our at [email protected].

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