Financial instruments v ‘normal’ assets and liabilities

Hi Stephen,

I hope you can help clarify this for me. I don’t know if I am being completely stupid here or missing something key!

I’m studying Financial Instruments and getting confused about these versus ‘normal’ assets and liabilities that I would think about in financial statements under the basic conceptual framework. I understand that either way, there has to be two sides, so one entity would have the asset and another would have the liability.

Can you please help? if a question came up im not sure how I would know to refer to Financial Instrument related IFRS or IAS rules, or just think about the ‘item’ as basic is it a liability or an asset?

I hope you can understand this 🙂

Thank you!