As IFRS reporting offers a wide scope of benefits, the number of companies which elect to adopt IFRS is growing all over the world. The benefits can be summarized as follows:

• Improve the quality and consistency of information that management needs,
• Enable your company to be understood in a global marketplace, access world capital markets and promote new business,
• Allow a company to benchmark itself against its peers throughout the world,
• Allow investors and others to compare the company's performance with competitors globally,
• Improve the comparability of entities and provide more consistent financial information,
• Accepted as a financial reporting framework for companies seeking admission to almost all of the world's stock exchanges,
• Enhance comparability, improve quality of communication to their stockholders, decrease investor uncertainty, reduce risk, increase market efficiency and eventually minimizes the cost of capital,
• Considered as an opportunity to make some strategic improvements to your finance systems and processes,
• Help companies to have a competitive advantage in negotiations with credit institutions and accordingly cost of borrowings are reduced,
• Result in more accurate risk evaluations by lenders and to a lower risk premium,
• Help companies to take advantage of alternative forms of finance,
• Makes easier to implement cross-border acquisitions, initiate partnerships & cooperation agreements with foreign entities,
• Last but not the least: The conversion will enable you to comply with the upcoming New Turkish Commercial Code!

Through New Turkish Commercial Code, Turkish national regulators require all companies - regardless of size- to prepare their financial statements in accordance with "Turkish Accounting Standards” which are equivalent of IFRS. This means owners of small and medium-sized entities (SMEs) must consider the conversion process from existing accounting framework to IFRS.

The question is that "Can the potential benefits of full IFRS can be outweighed by the difficulty or cost of preparing IFRS information?”. The good news is that International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) recognizes this and embarked on new SME standards that will have the same accounting framework as full IFRS.

Considering the changing regulatory and competition environment as well as the globalization, the benefits of changing to IFRS can be very significant for some SMEs. However, the conversion process should not be taken lightly since this may not only a change of numbers. This process may have wider implications on systems, processes and people.