Accrual - Accrued Expenses and Accrued Revenues

Accrued Expenses and Accrued Revenues

The term accrual is also often used as an abbreviation for the terms accrued expense and accrued revenue that share the common name word, but they have the opposite economic/accounting characteristics.

• Accrued revenue: revenue is recognized before cash is received.
• Accrued expense: expense is recognized before cash is paid out.

Accrued revenue (or accrued assets) is an asset, such as unpaid proceeds from a delivery of goods or services, when such income is earned and a related revenue item is recognized, while cash is to be received in a latter period, when the amount is deducted from accrued revenues.

In the rental industry, there are specialized revenue accruals for rental income which crosses month end boundaries. These are normally utilized by rental companies who charge in arrears, based on an anniversary of a contract date. For example a rental contract which began on 15 January, being invoiced on a recurring monthly basis will not generate its first invoice until 14 February. Therefore at the end of the January financial period an accrual must be raised for 16 days worth of the monthly charge. This may be a simple pro-rata basis (e.g. 16/31 of the monthly charge) or may be more complex if only week days are being charged or a standardized month is being used (e.g. 28 days, 30 days etc.).

Accrued expense is a liability whose timing or amount is uncertain by virtue of the fact that an invoice has not yet been received. The uncertainty of the accrued expense is not significant enough to qualify it as a provision. An example of an accrued expense is a pending obligation to pay for goods or services received from a counterpart, while cash is to be paid out in a latter accounting period when the amount is deducted from accrued expenses.

In the United States of America, this difference is best summarized by IAS 37 which states:

"11 Provisions can be distinguished from other liabilities such as trade payables and accruals because there is uncertainty about the timing or amount of the future expenditure required in settlement. By contrast:

"(a) trade payables are liabilities to pay for goods or services that have been received or supplied and have been invoiced or formally agreed with the supplier; and

"(b) accruals are liabilities to pay for goods or services that have been received or supplied but have not been paid, invoiced or formally agreed with the supplier, including amounts due to employees (for example, amounts relating to accrued vacation pay). Although it is sometimes necessary to estimate the amount or timing of accruals, the uncertainty is generally much less than for provisions.

"Accruals are often reported as part of trade and other payables, whereas provisions are reported separately."

To add to the confusion, some legalistic accounting systems take a simplistic view of 'accrued revenue' and 'accrued expenses", defining each as revenue or expense that has not been formally invoiced. This is primarily due to tax considerations, since the act of issuing an invoice creates, in some countries, taxable revenue, even if the customer does not ultimately pay and the related receivable becomes uncollectable.