Deferred Revenue Accruals - Sales Receipts Instead of JEs
J
Jason Powell
First off, the Accruals module in general has been a game changer for me in terms of Assets and Prepaids, thank you so much for developing that! I was overjoyed when I saw that Deferred Revenue had been added to the lineup, because it had the potential to truly and completely turn my rev recognition workflow 180 degrees from a nightmare mess of spreadsheets to a single entry point, one and done.
The problem is that my primary use-case client is an online SaaS company who offers annual subscriptions that need to be amortized over the 12-month license cycle, but for non-negotiable internal reporting purposes, they specifically need each user's individual monthly license accrual to be recorded as one of their Product Catalog "items" in QBO via a Sales Receipt, not as a JE that posts a generic amount to the end revenue account. In our workflow, each Sales Receipt transaction is "deposited" to a dedicated clearing account on the balance sheet, and then a single monthly AJE simply migrates each month's accrual total out of the clearing asset account as a credit and out of the main Rev Deferral liability as a debit.
It certainly occurred to me that I could still try to use the current Double Accruals module if I simply created individual revenue accounts dedicated to each of the license types that they need to have broken out in their monthly reports (since all subscriptions currently post to a single "Licenses" revenue account), but I figured that as fast as new features seem to get introduced to Double these days, I might as well make a suggestion and see if it ends up being a possibility (before I completely reconfigure my client's COA to fit this specific purpose).
I obviously don't know the actual complexity involved in introducing a selectable alternative option in Revenue Deferrals that allows the user to choose whether they want the revenue entries to post as simple JEs or as Sales Receipts, but it seems like the only additional data points the user would need to provide in order to repurpose the module backend that's already in place would be the line item Product and their "Deposit To" clearing account. The underlying transaction is still essentially a two-line journal entry, just wrapped in a Sales Receipt that binds each transaction to a specific Product.
Anyway, I just wanted to suggest it since I can't stop thinking about how the Deferred Revenue module is sooooo close to being a tool that could save me untold hours over an entire year. If implementing that addition is unrealistic or absolutely not on the horizon, I'd love for someone at Double to confirm so I can make a determination about whether I want to dramatically alter the client's COA instead, just so I can take advantage of the tool and still give the client the reporting they need.
Thanks so much, love love love the product!