Analysts, journalists and other interested parties will be looking at companies through a different lens in a turbulent financial market, as accounting rules for expected credit losses start to bite.Accounting standards set rules that require banks and similar institutions to account for losses are expected to occur rather than losses that have occurred.Standard setters are asking banks to take a punt on what they reckon credit losses might be.These estimates will be at the centre of accounting for loan portfolios throughout the coronavirus pandemic and beyond. An accounting rule that was already causing heartburn because of estimates needed in a generally buoyant environment has now come into its own.Nobody knows what impact the coronavirus pandemic will have on banking operations. Not a single soul is able to tell a bank whether all of these loans they are giving payment holidays to are still going to be around.The figures a bank drops into its accounts - no doubt after much debate with auditors - will be the best guess they can make in the circumstances and the best guess will be what you need to be able to cope with in the future.This means that there are figures in the financial statements that should give users of the accounts an idea of what losses might impact on a bank or similar organisation, but they will be imprecise. A brief history lesson is warranted here.As the global financial crisis heaved 12 years ago, analysts were having trouble working out what problems banks and similar institutions were facing - because the accounts delayed recognition of things that were likely to be ugly.Accounting standard setters went through the rigmarole of determining the principles that might provide a better indicator of things a bank or similar institution are unlikely to get back when loans default. This is in part because there were people that thought accounting standards were at fault for things not being brought onto the accounts earlier to enhance the predictive value.Those readers with any sense of philosophy about these things will ask - and appropriately question - what the precise purpose of figures in accounts is meant to be if expected credit losses are in the books.The purpose of the current set of figures produced in accordance with accounting standards is to look a bit further down the road in the current financial statements. How useful that is will in part be determined by what additional information analysts and other stakeholders might ask companies to provide so their analysis might be more precise.