The clock is ticking for accountants and preparers of financial statements to get up to speed on a whole new method for conducting research and referencing accounting rules. The Financial Accounting Standards Board is putting the finishing touches on its “Accounting Standards Codification” with a launch date scheduled for July 1.

As a final step in the assembly and reorganization of the entire library of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, FASB published an exposure draft of a new accounting standard that would establish its online Codification as the sole authority for GAAP. The new standard also would abolish the traditional, multi-level “hierarchy” of GAAP by deeming everything in the codification as authoritative and everything outside of it non-authoritative.

“Hundreds of thousands of CPAs and other accounting professionals in the United States will need to completely re-learn everything they know about how U.S. GAAP is documented, updated, referenced, and accessed,” said Bruce Pounder, president of accounting education firm Leveraged Logic. “And right now most accountants are completely unaware that they’ll need to do so.”

Pounder said the codification and its soon-to-be status as the exclusive authority on GAAP represents a bigger change in accounting than most accountants realize. The codification not only assembles GAAP into a single source, but it also reorganizes it by topic and changes the way accountants must refer to it, for example in footnotes to financial statements.

“The codification does not simply take a catalog or inventory of existing pronouncements and put them under one umbrella,” he said. “It takes each pronouncement, breaks them down to the paragraph level into tens of thousands of little pieces, and reassembles those pieces so they are topically organized. It completely divorces the codification content from the historical pronouncements.”

Richard Dietrich, accounting professor at Ohio State University, said the codification simplifies research by assembling all of GAAP into one source. However, there’s some concern it may lead accountants to different or new conclusions. “That’s what we’re nervous about now,” he said. “You could have two people get different conclusions researching the same literature. What we’re especially concerned about is somebody missing something.”

Dietrich said ultimately the codification is a long-overdue tool that will help accountants, but there are still changes and uncertainty ahead as XBRL evolves to electronically tag data and as the United States moves closer to adopting International Financial Reporting Standards. The codification has been available on a trial-and-feedback basis since January 2008, and FASB still is collecting comments.