Paper Title
Compliance with Accounting Requirements of Companies Offering Customer Loyalty Programmes

Abstract
Customer Loyalty Programmes (CLPs) have grown in popularity over recent decades. For businesses offerings such programmes and stating compliance with financial reporting standards, it is important that these business to comply with all the accounting requirements relating to their CLP offering. The purpose of this research is to determine the accounting treatment relating to CLPs; and then to test the compliance of companies offering such programmes to the financial reporting requirements. Compliance to financial reporting standards are essential for users to make informed decisions about a company. The accounting requirements are obtained from International Financial Reporting Standards, and discussed in the literature. The study uses a qualitative research paradigm in the form of multiple instrumental case studies. Compliance to accounting requirements is empirically tested through a case study design and content analysis of the annual financial statements of companies that have implemented CLPs in South Africa. Compliance to the accounting standards are analysed on a Likert scale. A sample of cases are selected and the study allows generalisations to be made about the compliance of a wider group of companies’ offering such programmes. The results indicate that all companies substantially comply with all of the financial reporting requirements relating to the offering of CLPs by their businesses. This papers contributes to growing research on company compliance with financial reporting standards, although the paper is unique in investigating this specific compliance to accounting requirements for CLPs.The requirements are analysed in stages of the economic phenomena relating to CLPs, namely the initial transaction when the CLP reward is granted, and the subsequent transaction when the CLP reward is redeemed. The cases were anlysed based on the current accounting requirements for CLP’s in International Accounting Standard 18 (Revenue) and Interpretation (IFRIC) 13, but future research will analyse cases against the newly effective International Financial Reporting Standard 15 (IFRS 15 Revenue from contracts with customers). Keywords - Customer Loyalty Programmes, Disclosure, Accounting Requirements, IAS 18, IFRS 15, IFRIC 13