The Millionaire’s Guide On Accrued Income

Zahid Hussain
3 min readMar 19, 2021

Image source: econlib

“A business with a income at its heels, furnishes always oil for its own wheels”

-William Cowper

Accrued income is money that’s been grossed but has yet to be acquired. The harmonious conjecture stipulates that revenue be acknowledged in the equivalent stretch of time period as expenditures aroused in bringing in the money.

Accrued revenue

Repeatedly established as accrued revenue, accrued revenue is also brought into play in the service sector or in the ball game where patrons are paid an hourly remuneration for vocation that has been effectuated but will be billed in a future accounting phase.

To put it bluntly, Accrued revenue is revenue that has been earned but not invoiced yet. Sometimes It is vociferated as unbilled revenue.

Accrued revenue is revenue that we’ve earned in the past that we hadn’t built the client for yet. So as of now in the present, we haven’t raised an invoice yet that’ll happen later in the future.

Quadrating With An Example

Let’s think of this in terms of a buyer and a seller.

If we’re the seller then we provide goods or services to the buyer, once the work is done, we send them an invoice and in return they send us the cash transaction complete.

We accrue revenue whenever we have provided goods or services in the past that we haven’t billed the client for yet. At some point in the future we intend to raise an invoice and after we’ve done that we’ll receive the payment.

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Why do we even bother?

It all comes down to the accrual basis of accounting. In accrual accounting, revenue is recognised when it’s earned not when cash changes hands. The issue with this scenario is that we provided the goods or services in the past. That’s when we did the work, that’s when we earned the revenue but we hadn’t raised the invoice yet. An invoice prompts us to record transactions in our general ledger. So under normal circumstances we wouldn’t be recognising this revenue until the invoice is raised, which in this situation would be some time later in the future. So right now in the present we need to post an adjusting entry into our general ledger to recognise the revenue in the past when we earned it.

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Final Words

Accrued revenue is enumerated in the balance sheet asset fragment as it dispenses a embryonic score for the corporation in the conformation of a realizable cash remittance.

Singular companies can also engender emolument without concretely accruing it, which is the substructure of the accrual accounting system.

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Zahid Hussain

An electronics engineer with an unique eye to content writing.