M any community banks have been granted a reprieve from implementing current expected credit losses (CECL) accounting standards thanks to a one-year extension that pushed the date to Jan. 1, 2023-but that doesn't mean they can put preparing for CECL on the back burner. The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) delayed implementation for private and small public companies in 2019, acknowledging smaller fi nancial institutions needed more time to adopt the accounting changes. It's another win for ICBA and community banks; they pushed back against FASB's initial proposal, which would have been far more complicated and expensive. But that doesn't mean preparing for CECL is without its challenges. Industry experts note that even some megabanks with massive resources wish they had more than three and a half years to prepare for CECL implementation, which began Jan. 1 of this year for large SEC fi lers. Be proactive on CECL CECL requires community banks to add a forward-looking component to their allowance for loan and lease losses (ALLL) calculation, projecting future losses forward into the future as long as reasonably possible and then reverting to historical loss experience. To do this, banks will need to gather new data from core and data processing systems so they can build and test models and then include the data in footnote disclosures in fi nancial statements. The good news for community banks-especially those with fewer than $1 billion in assets, straightforward business models and limited loan loss experience-is that they should be able to rely on existing loss estimation techniques like Microsoft Excel-based systems, says James Kendrick, ICBA's independentbanker.org Q 65http://www.independentbanker.org