This is the 700th posting on this blog…
..so I thought I might take a brief pause for review. As far as I know, this is the world’s longest-running financial reporting blog (going back to December 2013); even if I’m wrong about that, I’m pretty sure this one scores highest on the intersection of longevity and productivity, with a new post every five days, in each case no shorter than 800 words (I admit, this might seem not so much admirably disciplined as just neurotically obsessive). There was a brief period, maybe eight years or so ago, when I thought I might run out of material, and reduced the updating to weekly; I then rapidly started to accumulate a backlog and soon went back to the original pace, which has continued ever since (I can confirm that I do take vacations – WordPress allows you to schedule posts in advance).
From my perspective, the number of posts is actually significantly higher than 700, because before this one, I maintained a similar blog on the website of a Canadian accounting firm. When that firm merged with another, those posts all disappeared: I tried for a while to keep going under the umbrella of the merged firm before starting over on my own (I just like having control!) Although I mostly write all this for myself, for my own education and mental discipline and, as the line goes, to exercise what’s left of my wits, it’s still interesting of course to assess the response and interest. Of the 699-post archive (and leaving aside my recent comments on local matters, which is something of a special case), these have been the most viewed in 2023 to date:
Most of these indicate, I think, that there’s often someone out there looking for guidance on recurring nuts-and-bolts issues (the highest-ranked posts of 2022 were much the same). Of course, this blog is not a reliable source for advice on such things, nor on anything else; the most it can do is provide inputs which might help shape one’s thinking and point them to additional sources of guidance. But that seems to be all that a large number of users come here for. It’s amusing to me that some of the most popular posts are substantially cut-and-paste jobs, reporting on something issued by Canada’s IFRS Discussion Group or the like, with minimal personal commentary; the posts on which I spend the longest are often the ones that attract the least interest. So there you go, a regular lesson in humility…
The exception to those comments is of course the number one entry, on accounting for girlfriends, going back to 2014 and still the top post in many individual months (over 4,000 hits in all). The strange thing is that I didn’t originate that piece of comedy; the post I wrote merely comments on and links to someone else’s work. I would credit him (presumably it’s a him) by name, but as far as I know the author has remained anonymous. Maybe one day he’ll step forward to bask in glory. I later wrote a follow-up post on the topic which in contrast never gets looked at by anyone.
But one thing I’m quite sure of is that this blog is the world’s largest repository of IFRS-related humour. You may understandably think that this isn’t exactly an “achievement,” but I have regularly amused myself, if no one else, in this respect. Among other things, you can find pieces on alternative uses of “IFRS” as an acronym, fake conversations between incoming and outcoming IASB Chairs, fake IASB job postings, fake selections from the IASB Chair’s mailbag, and from that of the ISSB Chair, and more than I can remember. If such pieces didn’t exist here, we can safely assume they wouldn’t have popped up anywhere else.
When I talk in terms of the world, it’s fun to think that the blog has been visited at one time or another by people from just about everywhere. The top countries are not too surprisingly Canada, the US, the UK and Australia, and then the list goes down to single clicks from the likes of Micronesia, Guinea-Bissau, Andorra and the Northern Mariana Islands. All in all, I don’t suppose it’s a Hall of Fame level achievement, but if someone were to read their way in sequence through the whole archive it would be…well, very boring, but also a one-of-a-kind record of the vicissitudes of financial reporting, and the culture that conditions it, during a particular time and place. So, on to the next one. I’ll be back in five days, and until then, as I put it once before, I’m off to listen to Taylor Swift while counting grains of salt.
The opinions expressed are solely those (and always have been!) of the author.
John Hughes IFRS Blog 