Since January 2005, British companies have had to comply with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

Unfortunately, in order to meet the deadlines for IFRS, many companies have had to produce their first set of IFRS accounts more or less by hand. Typically this will have involved the use of a lot of spreadsheets.

Ultimately this isn't sustainable and companies will have to either rplace this ad hoc spreadsheet-based approach or take steps to make such an approach more robust.

While we do not know what the future holds, it is unlikely to be regulation and compliance free. In particular, the EU may decide to harmonise legislation on fraud and money laundering and the insurance industry may become increasingly regulated in line with other capital markets.

Obviously we do not yet know what future regulation map say about the use of spreadsheets and spreadsheet-based systems. It is likely, however, that future legislation will remain principles based and seek to reduce spreadsheet risk.

For this reason, future legislation is likely to focus on themes we have already seen:-

Access Control and Security

Version Control and Audit Trails

Model Robustness and Testing

Back-Ups and Archiving

Appropriate Business Processes

Are you going to wait for the future? Or are you going to be able to tell your boss that your company's Spreadsheet Risk Management SRM™ is already taken care of?