Accrued Expenses Are Ordinarily Reported on the Balance Sheet as

What are Accrued Expenses?

Accrued expenses are expenses that are recognized at the time they are incurred, even though cash has not yet been paid. These expenses are paired up against revenue via the matching principle from the GAAP (More often than not Accepted Accounting Principles).

For those who are unaware of the matching principle, it states that you lot record revenues and all related expenses in the accounting menses in which they occur. This is true regardless of whether or not cash has actually been received by the seller or paid out by the heir-apparent.

Types of Accrued Expenses

There are unlike types of accrued expenses. However, in this article, we focus on the more than common accrued expenses that you will see every bit an accountant from time to time:

1. Accrued Salaries and Wages
2. Accrued Involvement

In demonstrating and showing examples of accrued expenses, we are using MS Excel. If yous are unfamiliar with Microsoft’southward spreadsheet program, be sure to bank check out our free Excel crash class.

Accrued Salaries and Wages

This type of accrued expense is very common and occurs regularly within company operations. Following is an instance to demonstrate how and when this type of accrued expense may occur.

Example

Corporate Finance Institute pays salaries of $58 per day in a 5-day piece of work calendar week every week. The last time employees were paid was on June 30, Friday. Unfortunately, due to statutory holidays occurring in the preceding calendar week (Monday and Tuesday), employees were only paid for Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Information technology means direction needed to prepare adjusting entries to recognize employees take only been paid three days out of five. This is the entry that management would record:

Notice that on Fri, July vii, direction would record the recognition of the accrued salaries expense. This is the salaries that accept accrued over the three days, which can be establish through some math: (58/5)*3.

At present, when the visitor reaches the end of their 5-day work week, which lands on Tuesday of side by side week, July 11, direction records the payment of the salaries. This is shown in the second entry by debiting the salaries and wages payable business relationship by the amount that was accrued and debiting the salaries expense account. Nosotros as well credit cash to demonstrate that cash was paid for salaries. Notation that salaries payable is like to accounts payable.

Accrued Interest

Accrued interest is some other type of accrued expense that is mutual for companies with notes payables. Notes payables are promissory notes issued past either an individual, banks, or even other companies that obligate the issuing political party (the one who must pay it dorsum) to pay back the amount stated by a sure date. Just like earlier with salaries and wages, we use an example to demonstrate what nosotros mean.

Example

On January 1, Corporate Finance Institute issued a ane-year promissory notation to AC Bank. The terms of the promissory note were a $10,000 value along with an annual interest rate of ii%. Because the note was for a term of one year, the maturity date of the notation would exist Dec 31 of the nowadays year. These are the journal entries that the visitor would record:

The very offset entry on Jan ane is the recording of the issuance of the note. Retrieve that the note’s face value was $x,000, with an almanac interest of ii%. The next entry on February ane records the accrued involvement for the month of Jan. We tape involvement every calendar month to recognize the monthly interest that we are obligated to pay. All this monthly interest eventually adds up to the annual interest amount at the end of the year.

To record the monthly interest expense, we have the face value of $10,000, multiply it by the annual interest rate of two%. This gives us $200, which is our annual interest. We and so divide this annual interest by 12 (200/12), and we end up with $16.67. This will be the monthly involvement that we record every month leading up to the last month, when we actually pay the interest due.

The last entry represents the payment of the note, along with all involvement that has accrued over the life of the notation. Again, we encounter that at that place is a debit of interest payable along with a debit of interest expense. This is done because we are paying off all of the accrued involvement forth with the last bit of interest that accrues in December. An important thing to notation is that debits must always equal credits. Otherwise, issues can arise in your financial statements,
particularly in the residual canvas and income statement, because these two statements are closely related to ane another.

Learn More

CFI is the official provider of the global Commercial Cyberbanking & Credit Annotator (CBCA)® certification program, designed to aid anyone become a globe-class financial annotator. To keep advancing your career, the additional CFI resources below will be useful:

• Adjusting Entries
• Projecting Balance Sheet Items
• Current Liabilities
• Depreciation Expense
• Financial Modeling Certification