Abgegrenzte Aufwendungen

10:13 Jan 24, 2016 

the most authoritative source for IFRS financial statements is the IFRS website, which also includes texts of the standards in several different languages and an online glossary. If, however, you are looking for HGB translations, it is not so relevant.

02:52 Jan 24, 2016 

That's a very helpful answer. Maybe you or Ted could recommend reliable sources specifically for financial statements? The abra search function doesn't have everything that comes up and the notes don't always give specific IFRS references to check. Statements of cash flows are often more difficult in this regard.

21:44 Jan 23, 2016 

Niamh: There can be little doubt that these are "prepaid expenses", as in "aktivische RAP", in other words expenditures in the reporting period that represent recognised expenses in the following period. This is also evident from the statement that these were reported as "other assets" in the prior period, which is the standard IFRS practice for presenting prepaid expenses.

You should avoid using "prepayments" here, because this is the term normally reserved for prepayments on assets, i.e. "geleistete Anzahlungen" in German GAAP.

The client seems to have found "accrued expenses" as a back-translation of IAS 12 IEC3, where "Accrued expenses will never be deductible for tax purposes." is translated in the German Bound Volume as "Abgegrenzte Aufwendungen werden niemals steuerlich abzugsfähig." But this appears only once in the entire corpus of IFRSs, and represents a very different context in any case, and must therefore be rejected as not relevant for your purposes.

BTW, I agree with Ted about EY's illustrative FS. This also applies to all the Big Four illustrative IFRS FS: potentially very useful for translating En->De, but of little practical help for translating German IFRS FS.

21:49 Jan 22, 2016 

look back to the note on "Übrige Vermögenswerte" in the 2013 Foris accounts: "Es handelt sich um Vorauszahlungen, deren Gegenleistungen in zukünftigen Dienstleistungen bestehen. Die Bewertung erfolgt zum Marktwert. " The official eIFRS glossary entry for "Vorauszahlungen" is "prepayments" which is what you put. It also makes sense from a common sense perspective. I.e. the company paid up front for (presumably legal) services to be received in subsequent periods.

20:39 Jan 22, 2016 

In this case they are prepayments made.

20:06 Jan 22, 2016 

Abgrenzungen under assets (previous year unter der Bezeichnung „Übrige Vermögenswerte“.") would be prepaid expenses (or deferred expenses under very old US-GAAP terminology). Accrued expenses are liability items. Care needs to be taken with "prepayments" so that it is clear whether they are prepayments made or prepayments received (on account of orders). And take E&Y English translations with a small grain of salt. They are often written by native German speakers and can sometimes be a bit "off".