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June 23, 2022
Question

Why is quickbooks reporting and recording deferred revenue as a negative balance?

  • June 23, 2022
  • 2 replies
  • 0 views

When customers pay in advance for six months of use of a product, we record the deposit in a deferred revenue account (Other Current Liabilities).   We then use a recurring journal entry to move portions of the payment by debit to the deferred revenue account and a credit to the product account (Income account).  This process appears to be standard practice.  

 

Yet Quickbooks Online records this as a negative balance in the deferred revenue account, and also reports a negative total in the liabilities section of the balance sheet

 

So for example, a customer buys $10,000 of pretzels to be delivered over 10 months.  The bank deposit comes in and we record the $10,000 in the Deferred Revenue Prepaid Pretzels account (A liability account according to the chart of accounts).  Each month, a recurring journal entry DEBITS the  Deferred Revenue Prepaid Pretzels account $1,000 and Credits the Pretzel Sales account (an Income account according to the chart of accounts). 

 

After two months, we see a negative balance of $8,000 (-$8000) in the Deferred Revenue Prepaid Pretzels account and that amount also shows up under "Liabilities" on the balance sheet as a NEGATIVE number. 

 

Most accounting guidelines suggest that I'm doing something wrong here, but I can't figure out what.  

 

Ideas?  Thanks!

2 replies

Rustler
June 24, 2022

The procedure you are using is correct

 

If the deferred revenue account is showing an actual negative number on the balance sheet, -8,000 in other words I would run an account report and set the date range to ALL.  Then scan down the list to insure all journal entries that should be there, are there.

June 27, 2022
This means that typically the initial entry denoting the prepaid expense will not affect a company's financial statements because the service or product has not ...