CommentCompanies such as the Commonwealth Bank continue to run the risk of confusing the mass of its 800,000 investors when they highlight differing numbers as ways of determining profit and reporting corporate performance.CBA points to a figure they define as a cash basis profit as being the figure they believe represents the better measure of entity performance, which means that the board and management consider certain impacts of accounting standards should be kept out of the number that is used to present the company's performance.The release of the bank's annual report on Monday allows a closer view of the cash profit and its merits.That cash basis profit or net profit after tax (cash basis) for CBA over the year to June 2017 was put at A$9.88 billion, which represents an increase on the previous year's cash basis profit of $9.45 million. In keeping with years of rarely challenged habit, the bank has taken out a bunch of stuff - required by accounting standards - to get these figures.The banks says that cash basis "represents net profit after tax and non-controlling interests before Bankwest non-cash items, the gain/loss on disposal of controlled entities/investments, treasury shares valuation adjustment, and unrealised gains and losses related to hedging and IFRS volatility". It should be noted at this point that the bank is transparent about the line items it excludes from the so-called cash basis calculation and no careful reader of its financials is left in doubt about the way number crunching has been done. The removal of IFRS volatility, however, is a curious move and one that is open to challenge. Such volatility often relates to unrealised gains or losses finding their way to the bottom line and it is arguable whether those gains or losses are validly excluded given that they will represent a movement in value to the entity. Of close interest is the effect that the exclusion of hedging and IFRS volatility has had over the past two reporting periods. This is probably one of the clearest illustrations of the impact the observers of the bank's accounting practices will get of the implications of the removal of the hedging and IFRS swings and roundabouts.Remember that cash basis profit of $9.45 million reporting for the 2016 financial year? That number excluded a massive hit of $199 million that was included in the statutory profit and attributable to said volatility. The statutory profit for that year was $9.22 billion.There was a $272 million turnaround in the statutory numbers between the 2016 and the 2017 financial year as a result of some reversal in volatility. The $9.22 billion statutory basis profit in 2016 looks rather different to the $9.93 billion that was reported in accordance with accounting requirements this year.The bank gets full marks for being consistent and not switching to or highlighting the more positive statutory result for convenience sake in the most recent financial year. It remains a problem for the bank, however, that it uses a basis that removes what is volatility