At its meeting on October 13-14, 2021, the AcSB continued its discussions on developing proposals to address the issues regarding the customer’s accounting for fees paid in a cloud computing arrangement and the related implementation costs. The AcSB tentatively decided at its September 2021 meeting to develop guidance that would allow entities to capitalize directly attributable implementation costs in a situation when the cloud computing arrangement is a software service. At this meeting, the Board discussed how an entity should present such costs in the financial statements. The Board considered various balance sheet presentation options and tentatively decided that an entity should present such costs as prepaid expenses. In addition, the AcSB considered a revised simplification approach aimed at permitting entities to expense the amounts in a cloud computing arrangement without having to perform a complex analysis of the arrangement. The Board directed staff to seek input from its Private Enterprise Advisory Committee and Not-for-Profit Advisory Committee on the approach developed to date to determine if the approach achieves the intended simplification objective. The AcSB will discuss the Advisory Committees’ feedback on the proposals developed to date at its December 2021 meeting.

Review the Executive Summary on the AcSB's Web site.