What's in a number?

There's been a flurry of financial reporting activity recently: Greene King, Marston's - neé Wolverhampton & Dudley Breweries - Brulines and the Capital Pub Company all revealed numbers within days of each other.

And nothing concentrates the mind on accounting issues like going through results statements (I know, I know, I need to get a life).

While headline figures are easy enough to navigate, assessing year-on-year activity means examining things like the like-for-like numbers. Some companies are rather more forthcoming than others when it comes to revealing quite what they mean by the phrase 'like-for-likes'.

We company-watchers try to get to the bottom of things, but sometimes the waters are less than crystal clear. And when a company decides to make great play of a figure in a reporting period that it didn't in the previous one, well, that's when one's bullshit detector really grinds into life.

Now, the name Sir David Tweedie may not be a familiar figure to everyone in the pub trade, but as head of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) he has considerable clout when it comes to determining how companies report their results, as any finance director worth his or her salt will attest.

An unassuming Scot - aren't we all? - Tweedie is possessed of no small amount of zeal when it comes to the transparency of corporate information. One of the things on the IASB's 'to do' list next year is a look at the way earnings per share figures are reported.

There are too many variables, Tweedie believes. He wants to go further. In a recent radio interview he said the IASB was "fed up with all this EBITDA and 'earnings before' bad stuff - we'll be getting earnings before expenses next".

No guarantees but maybe the IASB could nail 'like-for-likes' in the process, creating a level playing field. Or at least a less bumpy one.