What Is Unearned Revenue? Definition, Examples & Types of Unearned Revenue in Accounts

When you receive unearned revenue, you will record it on your business balance sheet first and then make the journal entry. First, you will debit prepaid revenue under current liabilities or the specific unearned revenue https://www.bookstime.com/ account type. Later, you will make the necessary adjusting journal entries once you recognize part of or the entire prepaid revenue amount. For example, a contractor quotes a client $1000 to retile a shower.

Below you’ll find everything you need to know about unearned revenue and how it affects your small business. More specifically, the seller (i.e. the company) is the party with the unmet obligation instead of the buyer (i.e. the customer that already issued the cash payment). During this period, they collected total customer advances equivalent to $12,000. This amount was considered an advance for the service period 1st January 2020 till 31st March 2020.

Is Unearned Revenue a Liability?

The $5,000 payment you’ve received from your clients for the premium experience is considered unearned revenue. While you have been able to bring your clients in on a new premium experience, your business has yet to provide the services or products that have been promised in return for the opt-in. For this reason, the revenue is considered “unearned” and is recorded as a liability in the books.

QuickBooks offers a wide range of financial reporting capabilities, along with expense tracking and invoice features. Here is an example of Beeker’s Mystery Box and what their balance sheet might look like. As you can see, the unearned revenue will appear on the right-hand side of the balance sheet in the current liabilities column. After James pays the store this amount, he has not yet received his monthly boxes. Therefore, Beeker’s Mystery Boxes would record $240 as unearned revenue in their records.

Adjusting entry for unearned revenue

As a result, if it ploughs five times in the first month of the winter, it could justifiably recognise 25% of the unearned revenue. This method is more accurate than straight line detection, but it is dependent on the correctness of the baseline amount of units to be absorbed (which may be inaccurate). However, since you have not yet earned the revenue, unearned revenue is shown as a liability to indicate that you still owe the client your services. Until you “pay them back” in the form of the services owed, unearned revenue is listed as a liability to show that you have not yet provided the services.

Preparing adjusting entries is one of the most challenging (but important) topics for beginners. If you disregard revenue recovery, you’ll end up with high churn rates and lose business fast. Get instant access to video lessons taught by experienced investment bankers. Learn financial statement modeling, DCF, M&A, LBO, Comps and Excel shortcuts. Over 1.8 million professionals use CFI to learn accounting, financial analysis, modeling and more.

Finding unearned revenue on a balance sheet

However, even smaller companies can benefit from the added rules provided in the accrual system, so you may want to voluntarily work with accrual accounting from the start. Earned revenue means you have provided the goods or services and therefore have met your obligations in the purchase contract. ProfitWell Recognized allows you to minimize and even eliminate human errors resulting from manual balance sheet entries.

An annual subscription for software licenses is an unearned revenue example. Recognizing deferred revenue is common for software as a service (SaaS) and insurance companies. You’ll see an example of the two journal entries your business will need to create unearned revenue below when recording unearned revenue. Taking the previous example from above, Beeker’s Mystery Boxes will record its transactions with James in their accounting journals. Unearned Revenue is considered as a liability from the perspective of the company.

Accrual Concept of Accounting

Over time, the revenue is recognized once the product/service is delivered (and the deferred revenue liability account declines as the revenue is recognized). Unearned revenue is recorded on the liabilities side of the balance sheet since the company collected cash payments upfront and thus has unfulfilled obligations to their customers as a result. As mentioned earlier, when customers pay in advance, it impacts the bank account and the unearned revenue account.

• They receive payments in advance from their customers, for the internet services that they use in a given month.
• When you receive unearned revenue, it means you have taken up front or pre-payments before the actual delivery of products or services, making it a liability.
• Your business will need to credit one account and debit another account with the correct amounts using the double-entry accounting method.
• For example, a contractor quotes a client $1000 to retile a shower.
• She deducts ₹500 from unearned revenue and credits ₹500 to revenue.
• Despite obtaining payment from a consumer, the corporation still obligations the delivery of products or services.