Change in accounting policy
The company starts measuring an item differently: recognising revenue at another moment, changing asset useful lives, reclassifying costs.
How to read the number
A break in the trend while the business is unchanged is almost always explained here rather than in operations.
When the metric lies
Some changes are applied retrospectively to all periods, others only going forward. In the second case neighbouring years cannot be compared with each other.
Also known as: policy change