1 10 Adjusting Entry Examples Financial and Managerial Accounting

At the end of an accounting period, you must make an adjusting entry in your general journal to record depreciation expenses for the period. The IRS has very specific rules regarding the amount of an asset that you can depreciate each year. You don’t have to compute depreciation for your books the same way you compute it for tax purposes, but to make your life simpler, you should. An adjusting journal entry is usually made at the end of an accounting period to recognize an income or expense in the period that it is incurred.

Adjusting entries must involve two or more accounts and one of those accounts will be a balance sheet account and the other account will be an income statement account. You must calculate the amounts for the adjusting entries and designate which account will be debited and which will be credited. Once you have completed the adjusting entries in all the appropriate accounts, you must enter them into your company’s general ledger.

Employees are often paid for work up to a Friday (last day of the work week – for many). Refer to the trial balance above which shows an unadjusted balance in prepaid insurance of $2,400. Recall from the transaction summary that Big Dog paid for a 12-month insurance policy that went into effect on January 1 (transaction 5). The adjusting entries split the cost of the equipment into two categories. The Accumulated Depreciation account balance is the amount of the asset that is “used up.” The book value is the amount of value remaining on the asset.

Not Adjusting Entries for one month leads to an inaccurate quarterly report. An inaccurate quarterly report makes an inaccurate yearly report. Like accruals, estimates aren’t common in small-business accounting. Keep in mind, this calculation and entry will not match what your accountant calculates for depreciation for tax purposes. But this entry will let you see your true expenses for management purposes. Depreciation and amortization are common accounting adjustments for small businesses.

What Is the Purpose of Adjusting Journal Entries?

Each of the five steps of adjusting entries either debits an expense or credits a revenue. If so, you probably need to make an adjusting entry in your general journal to properly account for the sale. You may need to have your accountant help you with this type of transaction. If you have employees, chances are you owe them a certain amount of wages at the end of an accounting period. The $100 balance in the Supplies Expense account will appear on the income statement at the end of the month.

• Depreciation is the process of assigning a cost of an asset, such as a building or piece of equipment over the economic or serviceable life of that asset.
• When office supplies are bought and used, an adjusting entry is made to debit office supply expenses and credit prepaid office supplies.
• If you DON’T “catch up” and adjust for the amount you used, you will show on your balance sheet that you have $1,000 worth of supplies at the end of the month when you actually have only $900 remaining.
• For example, a utility bill received at the end of the accounting period is likely not payable for 2–3 weeks.

Adjusting entries usually involve one or more balance sheet accounts and one or more accounts from your profit and loss statement. In other words, when you make an adjusting entry to your books, you are adjusting your income or expenses and either what your company owns (assets) or what it owes (liabilities). Regardless of how meticulous your bookkeeping is, though, you or your accountant will have to make adjusting entries from time to time.

Resources for Your Growing Business

However, in practice, revenues might be earned in one period, and the corresponding costs are expensed in another period. Also, cash might not be paid or earned in the same period as the expenses or incomes are incurred. To deal with the mismatches between cash and transactions, deferred or accrued accounts are created to record the cash payments or actual transactions. If you don’t make adjusting entries, your income and expenses won’t match up correctly. At the end of the accounting period, you may not be reporting expenses that happen in the previous month. For example, say you need to hire a freelancer to help you at the end of February.

With cash accounting, this occurs only when money is received for goods or services. Accrual accounting instead allows for a lag between payment and product (e.g., with purchases made on credit). The date of the above entry would be at the end of the period in which the interest was earned. The adjusting entry is needed because the interest was accrued during that period but is not payable until sometime in the next period. The adjusting entry is posted to the general ledger in the same manner as other journal entries.

For tax purposes, your tax preparer might fully expense the purchase of a fixed asset when you purchase it. However, for management purposes, you don’t fully use the asset at the time of purchase. Instead, it is used up over time, and this use is recorded as a depreciation expense. Whereas you’d record a depreciation entry for a tangible asset, amortization is used to stretch the expense of intangible assets over a period of time. Let’s say you pay your employees on the 1st and 15th of each month.

Adjusting Entries: A Simple Introduction

Month-end close time constraints may limit the number of invoices entered and then processed within an accounting system. As a result, not all customer billing amounts (customer invoices) are entered into the accounting financial record-keeping system. An accrued revenue adjustment is needed in order to record the full amount of revenue earned throughout the period since all of the revenue earned has not been entered.

If depreciation adjustments are not recorded, assets on the balance sheet would be overstated. Additionally, expenses would be understated on the income statement causing net income to be overstated. If net income is overstated, retained earnings on the balance sheet would also be overstated. The cost less estimated residual value is the total depreciable cost of the asset. The straight-line method allocates the depreciable cost equally over the asset’s estimated useful life.

Adjusting Entries

Even though you’re paid now, you need to make sure the revenue is recorded in the month you perform the service and actually incur the prepaid expenses. So, your income and expenses won’t match up, and you won’t be able to accurately track revenue. Your financial statements will be inaccurate—which is bad news, since you need financial statements to make informed business decisions and accurately file taxes. This is posted to the Interest Receivable T-account on the debit side (left side). This is posted to the Interest Revenue T-account on the credit side (right side).

When you entered the check into your accounting software, you debited Insurance Expense and credited your checking account. However, that debit — or increase to — your Insurance Expense account overstated the actual amount of your insurance premium on an accrual basis by $1,200. So, we make the adjusting entry to reduce your insurance expense by $1,200. And we offset that by creating an increase to an asset account — Prepaid Expenses — for the same amount. The use of adjusting journal entries is a key part of the period closing processing, as noted in the accounting cycle, where a preliminary trial balance is converted into a final trial balance.

Initially, the concept of crediting Accumulated Depreciation may be confusing because of how we learned to adjust prepaids (debit an expense and credit the prepaid). Remember that prepaid items actually get used up and disappear over time. The Plant and Equipment asset account is not credited because, unlike a prepaid, a truck or building does not get used up and does not disappear. The goal in recording depreciation is to match the cost of the asset to the revenues it helped generate.

That’s why it’s essential to understand basic accounting adjusting entries in greater depth. A company usually has a standard set of potential adjusting entries, for which it should evaluate the need at the end of every accounting period. These entries should be listed in the standard closing checklist. Also, consider constructing a journal entry template for each adjusting entry in the accounting software, so there is no need to reconstruct them every month.

Prepaid Rent – Deferred Expense

An accrued revenue is the revenue that has been earned (goods or services have been delivered), while the cash has neither been received nor recorded. The revenue is recognized through an accrued revenue account and a receivable account. When the cash is received at a later time, an adjusting journal entry is made to record the cash receipt for the receivable account. The adjusting entry for taxes updates the Prepaid Taxes and Taxes Expense balances to reflect what you really have at the end of the month. The adjusting entry TRANSFERS $100 from Prepaid Taxes to Taxes Expense.

In March, Tim’s pay dates for his employees were March 13 and March 27. For example, a company that has a fiscal year ending December 31 takes out a loan from the bank on December 1. The terms of the loan indicate that interest payments are to be made every three months. In this case, the company’s first interest payment is to be made March 1.

Accumulated depreciation records the amount of the asset’s cost that has been expensed since it was put into use. Accumulated depreciation has a normal credit balance that is subtracted from a Plant and Equipment asset account on the balance sheet. Contra-asset accounts are asset accounts with a normal credit balance. An asset or liability account requiring adjustment at the end of an accounting period is referred to as a mixed account because it includes both a balance sheet portion and an income statement portion.