The FASB Accounting Standards Codification™ Research System website includes an easy-to-use and powerful search engine to facilitate your accounting research. In addition to the keyword search common in most popular search engines, Codification search adds features that lets you narrow your search results by related terms and within specific Areas, Topics, and Subtopics.

• Tutorial - Search
• General search from the top right of any page
• Advanced search / Search Again
• Narrowing your search from the Search Results page
• Site search

Tutorial

Click here to view the Search and Advanced Search tutorial.

General search from the top right of any page

To search for a term within the Codification, enter it into the Search text box and click Go (or press enter), the results display on the Search Results page at the Subsection level. You can also search for multiple terms and phrases and perform proximity searches by using advanced search. In the examples that follow, the search term or terms are in presented in bold text. 

• Single term—To search for "debt" enter debt. Search is not case sensitive so a search for Debt will return the same results.
  • Glossary terms—If any part of a glossary term name includes the terms of your search, then it is returned as a search result and presented separately.
  • Stemming—A search for either debenture or debentures will yield the same results. The search engine considers stemming—i.e., singular and plural.
• Multiple terms—To search for the occurrence of more than one term, simply enter each term in the search box. For example, entering debt restructuring is equivalent to search for debt AND restructuring, and returns, among other results, "Troubled Debt Restructurings".
• Phrases—To search for an exact phrase, enclose your search within quotes " ". For example, entering "major maintenance" returns results about "Planned Major Maintenance Activities".
• Smart terms—The Codification search engine maintains a designated list of defined phrases called smart terms. The smart terms include key phrases and aliases. For example, using the search expression “change in estimate” (without quotes) will provide search results that contain “change in accounting estimate”. Another example is that the search results for “research and development” will include “R&D” and “research & development”. The smart search results may differ from simple full-text searches that contain Boolean operators such as AND and OR.

Advanced Search / Search Again

Advanced search, and Search Again (that appears at the end of the search results page), provides you with additional ways to narrow a search.  Once you have completed the desired boxes, select the Submit button. 

• Text/Keyword—This field is used for keyword searches. This field includes the following options:
  • all—the results must contain all words; this is an AND search.
  • any word—the results must contain at least one of the words; this is an OR search.
  • exact phrase—the results must match the word sequence; this is a quote search. For example, a search for "debt covenant" only returns results that include the phrase "debt covenant" and would not include results that included only "debt" or only "covenant".
  • within [ ] words—the results must include all words that are within 'n' words of each other, where 'n' = a number; this is a proximity search.

• Codification Numbers—Enter any combination of specific Topic, Subtopic, and/or Section numbers to limit your search.

• Document Title/Heading—Use to search for keywords that only occur within Titles and/or headings. This is helpful when content with similar paragraph heading s span multiple sections in a Subtopic.  It works in a manner comparable to Combine Subsections.

• Area Type—Use to search within a specific Codification Area only.

Narrowing your search from the Search Results page

When you perform a search, the Codification search engine provides you with:

• The search results including content from the body of the Codification and glossary terms.
• A list of the highest occurring related terms that appear within the search results.
• The number of "hits" that occur within each Area, then Topic, and then Subtopic.

An explanation of each follows:

• By Related Term—The related term relationship is a calculation based on occurrence—how many times does the related term occur with the search term or terms; and proximity—how near (phrase, sentence, paragraph) is the related term to the search term or terms. Clicking a related term performs and AND search.  After selecting a related term, there is no reason to select Go.
• By Area > Topic > Subtopic:
  • When you get your initial search results, you are able to narrow your search by Area.
  • When you select one or more Areas and click Go, the subsequent set of search results allows you to search by Topic.
  • When you select one or more Topics and click Go, the subsequent set of search results allows you to narrow by Subtopic. The Subtopic is the lowest level you can narrow by since results are always presented at the Section level.

Site search

• Source Type—Select Codification to search within Codification content, or Site to exclude Codification content but include other site content—such as Help and PDF files.