"Snide" has several meanings, but the usual meaning is "disparaging". That seems to be the theme, rather than the exception, of amoe. I'm just trying to fit in.
There are two types of entries for this: the allowance method and the actual method. In the actual method, the invoice must be written off. In the allowance method, the invoice remains on the books but a figure is used to anticipate what invoices might be written off.
Have you never participated in an audited financial statement? They do everything from verify receivables to verify inventory. They live at the office for a couple of weeks off-and-on.
Huh? This makes little sense. This is what really scares the crap out of me, wondering if you (most people) read PayPal's TOS prior to agreeing to it? This is typical for most people that sign up for PayPal. I'm not the brightest person in the world, but I know what's in my wallet and how to use it.
BTW> Using PayPal for anything other than a money transference service is totally and utterly foolish! You should be doing daily sweeps of all incoming funds and using your bank's debit card system, not PayPals. I never understood the logic behind leaving more than $0.99 in your PayPal account.
Rita
Don't try to fit in, be yourself. The charter of this group is to piss off as many people as you can with the shortest amount of text and be added to as many killfiles as humanly possible. The trump card is talking about the heterosexually challenged, this will stir enough shit to get you in a baker's dozen worth of killfiles. I gave up long ago trying to have intelligent and logical conversations since most want to deteriorate it into a pissing contest. Use your 15-minutes of daily allotted Usenet time to briskly stir the pot.
Rita
Good cite. So how did they do it in 2003?
Are we restricted to letters or are symbols allowed? For some reason, I want to put a tilde in there.
That's the auditing part.
A
What confuses me is that mine is a debit card, but I can push "credit" and it goes through easier as in, I don't need the PIN.
A A
I was never an accountant. My business employed over 40 people, and one of them was an accountant. She had A/P and A/R clerks working for her. The business was a distribution company in a specialized field. All of our "income" was from sales of products.
I don't know what your company was like, but I never relied on the type of reports that I think you're used to generating to know where I stood. Those reports went to the bank to satisfy their requirement for my line of credit (many purchases of inventory were over $100,000 a pop since some stuff came from Germany and sales went out in amounts from a few thousand bucks to twenty or thirty thousand a pop)
I received abbreviated financial statements that basically tracked sales, collections, and expenses. I was more concerned about my accounts receivable aging report than I was about depreciation figures. I was more concerned about inventory movement than I was about adjusting entries. When you buy $120,000 of items that take three months to come in, you are always concerned about buying the right mix of items.
I paid Touche, Ross (and other firms over the course of the years) to come in quarterly and meet with the accountant and make sure the ducks were lined up from her end, but sales, collections, and personnel problems sucked up most of my time.
As the owner and manager of a company, you'd think that I would be concerned about how unearned income would be treated on the books (but I don't remember ever having any), but the actuality is that one of the salesmen would quit and I'd have to start interviewing for a replacement. Or some sales service desk person would start fussing with another sales service desk person about leaving dirty dishes in the break room and I'd have to mediate.
I had problems with inter-office groping, a female employee that got beat up by her husband every weekend and whose husband came over to kick the shit out of me because I suggested she look into a shelter, and bailed two warehouse men out of jail for non-work related problems. I had an employee that erased the back-up disk on our DEC mainframe and made a week's worth of entries on a blank disk, and a very good employee that I had to fire because he was into some sort of S&M weekend activities that made him too sore to work on Mondays.
Oh yeah, and my bank was sold three times (from Atlantic Bank to (I forget) to First Union) and I had to deal with three different sets of officers that wanted to pull my $2,000,000 line of credit until I had established myself with the new bank.
And you think I had time to worry about how a magazine books subscription income?
Any statements that I've made are to the best of my knowledge but may not always cover all the nuts and bolts of other industries.
The brain works quite well.
I never said a house should be a liability on the books. If you can find where I said that, you're the man and deserve an award for your Superman Xray vision. What I did say is that *I* consider whatever house I live in a liability (in my head) because it costs me money to live there ... whereever "there" is. It doesn't matter if it's a house, condo, apartment or rented room. It's a liability because it takes money out of my pocket.
Why is that so hard for everyone on AMOE except Angrie to understand?
It seems someone "smart" enough to earn an MBA would be smart enough to do their own taxes ... no matter how hard it is. I mean ... plumbers don't call other plumbers to fix a leak. I certainly never called anyone to fix my starters and alternators while I was repairing them.
My rule is .. never eat in a restaurant where the chef brings his own lunch.
BAM!!! There is your GAAP recognition and the statement that you are
100% wrong in your accounting practices. Maybe you got your training at Enron or MCI? Either way, just look it up on the internet as the man said and you should be fine.
Nope. Being "smart" enough is not the issue. An MBA course just touches on taxes, but does focus on them. If you make a lot of money, then an accoutant who specializes in taxes will save you a bunch of money. The more money you make and the more busineses and real estate you invest in, the more judgement it takes to fill out a return. It is not mechanical like it is if you make a hundred thousand or so from a regular job.
Understood it all along Walter. Just fun to watch. You are absolutely right in that what is a financial drain (liability) to you does not have squat to do with any accounting profession definition of a liability.
And tax accounting is to financial accounting as military music is to music.
Don't tell what I should do with my own money, Rita. I don't make a living on eBay. Mostly I use eBay to clear out 40-some years of collecting antiques, impulse purchases at farm auctions, and inherited stuff from two previous generations of antique buffs. I let the kids take what they wanted, I kept the stuff I still like in the house, and I'm clearing out boxes of "treasures" that I no longer want. I enjoy it.
My only problem is that I don't have the time to list all the stuff I should list. I could run 100 auctions a week if I could work up an interest in doing so. Right now, I'm clearing out a rental storage unit and putting up stuff as I unpack it.
I've got a pretty hefty PayPal balance and I leave it sit there. Maybe I'll let it continue to mount up and buy a couple of tickets to go back to Ireland to visit the relatives. Maybe I'll use for one of those cruises to Alaska that my wife would prefer over Ireland. She prefers staterooms to bed & breakfasts.
Everyone has their own foolishness when it comes to spending what they earn. My liquor bill is about $100 a year, I drive cars into the ground, I spend far too much money on books, I haven't lost over $100 gambling in my life, I buy the best seats at plays, and I never buy cheap shoes. I've earned my right to be foolish when it comes to spending money.
A couple of weeks ago I listed some reference books on antiques. One buyer bought three, but one similar item went unsold. I sent that item along with the three purchased items to the Buyer. What the Hell, I got a nice email from the Buyer and someone's now enjoying something I didn't need and I'm out maybe $5.00 if I re-listed.
You march to your drummer, and I'll march to mine.
Oops! "Angrie.Woman" was seen spray-painting on a wall:
In all of these examples, materiality is vital to the choice of policy for handling the activity.
For me, I may subscribe to a couple of magazines, and it makes sense to expense that at the time I pay for it. A subscription is usually for a year at a time, and is a nominal expense not worth the effort of amortizing on a monthly basis particularly since I'll be reporting things only on an annual basis. In theory, timing differences might mean that I'm assigning a whole $5 to the wrong fiscal year. That is totally immaterial.
In contrast, for a magazine publisher, the amounts involved for
800,000 subscriptions starting at different times are going to be quite material. For them, it's 800,000 times $5 that might be in the wrong fiscal year, which _isn't_ a small amount of money!I work for an Internet domain registry. We essentially manage "subscriptions" to domain names that may need to be amortized over as long as 10 years. Each one is pretty immaterial; the respective users of the domains probably simply expense the money they pay. But we wind up with pretty wacky "deferred income" numbers, and they certainly _are_ material.
Tell me, Walter, did you read that 21 page document and did you figure out which part of it pertained to earned income?
Did you understand the provisional information based on lines from it like "A significant portion of the production and sales effort has been completed"?
If so, explain to me how you are going to book a check from a customer that has given you a starter to repair and a deposit on that work. Is it revenue, or is it a liability? What is the effect on this decision if you've ordered the parts and started the repair? Remember, the check is a deposit and not the settlement of the bill.
What question has to be asked to make the above determination?
If so, explain to me how you are going to book that check if you do not have reasonable assurance that the customer will ever pick up the completed repair and pay the balance of the charge?
Does the question that has to be asked pertain to this aspect?
I can tell you, and I haven't had an accounting class since 1962.
For the record, no I didn't. Who has the time? I have other things going and use USENET, in this case, as a break.
What's to understand? That's the accountant's job and why I pay them whatever they ask.
How would I book it? Someone gives me a check for a deposit on some work, I deposit the check into my bank account (assuming I had one). If parts are needed, I order them. When the starter is done and works to my satisfaction, I call the customer and tell them it's ready. They bring me a check or cash to settle up. I enter the complete amount as income on whatever date we settle.
For the record, though, 99% of the time I didn't take deposits and when I did, they were income because I wasn't giving them back. All deposits at my shop were nonrefundable (assuming I had ordered parts and could deliver them in the specified time period).
I will book the check as income and not worry about if they will pick the starter up or not. There were times when people didn't pick their stuff up ... left a deposit or not. It didn't matter to me because most of the time, I had the parts in stock to fix the thing, anyway, and if I didn't, most of the time $8-10 would get the parts that I didn't have.
As for my starter business, it was a small time operation with me as the sole proprietor. I did my own accounting, etc and did fairly well all things considered. If I had other people working for me, it would've been a different story, but as it was, I could keep my eye on everything and knew when things weren't balanced.
As I said, I'm not an accountant. They make the money they make for a reason.
Actually, you seem to just think of it as the other side of the double entry in the case of a house carrying a mortgage. The house is an asset, but the mortgage is a liability.
A rented room can even be considered a liability because the expense becomes a liability (payable) until it is paid.
Perhaps you missed what I said before. I said that I think of a house as a liability. It has nothing to do with accounting practices and everything to do with how I think about things. For me, an asset is something that puts money in my pocket and a liability is something that takes money out. From that standpoint, anyplace I live is going to be a liability.
I'm not discussing the virtues of renting vs buying. I'm talking about buying vs buying something else down the road because one's income has gone up enough for them to be able to afford it. If a person's income increases and they continue to spend more because they can, they're in the same boat as if they hadn't gotten a raise at all ... in my opinion. It's not about how much money a person makes but how they spend it.
That said, if I have a house that I pay $5 a month for (we're using small numbers here ... but they could realistically be X 100 or 1,000), to me, that's a liability (if I didn't have the asset (the house), I wouldn't have the liability (the mortgage) so by their linked state, they are one and the same in my mind). If a person's income increases by $3 a month and they opt to buy a house that will cost them $8 a month, they haven't gained anything except a new 30 year (or whatever they sign up for) mortgage. If they do this at age 45, they will likely be paying for this house until they are 75 because they can't afford to pay anything additional on the mortgage.
If they thought of the house as a liability, though, then it wouldn't make sense for them to buy a new house at 45 because the old one has some equity built up in it and instead of spending all their money on a new house, they can save the money or invest it in something else (like another house for someone else to live in). This will increase their income (hopefully) and their asset column. Even if it costs them $100 a month to keep this additional property, someone else is still paying most of the mortgage/expenses and they are still $2 ahead (all other things being equal).
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