The Financial Accounting Standards Board has stated its terms for access to advanced research functionality for the new accounting rule book that takes effect July 1.

FASB will offer free access to a basic view of the Accounting Standards Codification, which is about to become the new, sole authoritative source for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. The basic view will provide access to the Codification homepage, with all accounting guidance from all authoritative sources organized by topic, including relevant guidance from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The basic view will facilitate a means to relate the topically organized guidance with the original accounting standard that made it part of GAAP. It also will provide some basic functionality to print accounting standards.

For the more advanced “professional” view, however, FASB will offer a great deal more functionality. The professional view will cost $850 annually for a single concurrent use, which means that more than one person within a firm or a company would be allowed to access the program, but not simultaneously. For multiple concurrent use, FASB will offer quantity discounts. The Financial Accounting Foundation and the American Accounting Association are collaborating to make the professional view available to students and faculty.

The professional view will provide fully functional access to the Codification designed to meet the needs of accounting and financial reporting professionals, as well as analysts and investors, FASB said. It will provide advanced text searching, cross-referencing, print-friendly functions, archives for accessing previous versions of content, joining features to link related pieces of guidance, a glossary function, e-mail features, and personal note-taking functions.

By providing research functions for a fee, FASB likely will be taking some business away from other established research services, most notably BNA’s Accounting Policy & Practice Series, CCH Accounting Research Manager, PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Comperio, and Thomson Reuters’ WG&L Checkpoint.

As FASB owns intellectual property rights to the Codification, it’s not clear how those other research services will continue to operate once the Codification becomes the sole source for authoritative GAAP. FASB did not respond to Compliance Week’s questions about the business aspects of its Codification.

Bruce Pounder, president of accounting education firm Leveraged Logic, said the two-level approach that FASB has established “balances the need for open access to the standards while ensuring fair compensation to FASB for providing optional features that have significant value to many users.” He said the professional view subscription will bring FASB into competition with other third-party providers.

“Depending on firms’ or individuals’ needs, a professional view subscription may be a better or worse choice than third-party alternatives for obtaining advanced research functionality,” Pounder said. “Therefore, firms and individuals may find it beneficial to re-examine their past purchasing decisions in light of FASB’s entry into the market.”