Accounting

Accounting studies how transactions, costs and assets are recorded and reported under fixed rules, so different users can interpret them consistently.

The classification of facility spend as capex or opex often drives sourcing choice more than operational logic does: a service that would technically fit better in-house gets outsourced because opex treatment is more favourable on the books, or vice versa. FM needs to know this accounting reality to see when a sourcing decision is really an accounting decision in disguise.

• Was a sourcing choice made on operational grounds, or actually driven by the capex/opex classification?
• How is shared facility cost allocated to departments, and does that allocation distort user behaviour?

• IFRS 16 — lease accounting, with direct consequences for the balance-sheet treatment of leases.
• General cost-allocation literature within management accounting.

• IFRS 16 has partly removed the traditional incentive to lease rather than buy, with consequences for how FM must frame investment decisions.

• Cost allocation and facility accounting

• Capex/opex classification and cost-allocation models

• Regieorganisatie — managing organisation / intelligent client function

  Oversight cost itself is often hard to classify cleanly and deserves explicit accounting agreements.

• IFRS 16 — Leases.

The standards section arrives in Part 7.

• An outsourcing decision presented as an operational improvement, when it is primarily an accounting shift from capex to opex.

It is insufficiently researched how IFRS 16 has changed FM sourcing patterns over the longer term, now that the balance-sheet advantage of leasing has largely disappeared.

• IFRS Foundation, IFRS 16 Leases — summary and explanation.