Allowance for Doubtful Accounts: Methods of Accounting for

Join the 50,000 accounts receivable professionals already getting our insights, best practices, and stories every month. You can use your AR aging report to help you calculate AFDA by applying an expected default rate to each aging bucket listed in the report. It helps them acknowledge the risks inherent in collecting on account and present more realistic AR figures.

The allowance, sometimes called a bad debt reserve, represents management’s estimate of the amount of accounts receivable that will not be paid by customers. If actual experience differs, then management adjusts its estimation methodology to bring the reserve more into alignment with actual results. While both bad debt expense accounting and allowance for doubtful accounts signify the same thing from a business perspective, the accounting world treats them very differently.

Typically, accountants only use the direct write-off method to record insignificant debts, since it can lead to inaccurate income figures. For instance, if revenue is recorded in one period but expensed in another, this leads to an artificially high revenue number for that first period. You will enter the bad debt expense of $750,000 as a debit and offset it by crediting AFDA with the same amount. A contra-asset decreases the dollar amount of the asset with which it is paired. In AFDA’s case, it is paired with accounts receivable and reduces its value on the balance sheet.

Recovering an Account

The bad debt expense is entered as a debit to increase the expense, whereas the allowance for doubtful accounts is a credit to increase the contra-asset balance. If your company relies primarily on credit sales, either number makes sense. If you have a significant amount of cash sales, determining your allowance for doubtful accounts based on percentage of accounts receivable collected will give you a higher margin of safety. However, this number might be too conservative and decrease your AR to unrealistic levels. Using historical collections data to estimate AFDA makes a lot of sense. Some companies choose to look solely at credit sales (since cash sales have a 100% collection rate,) while others look at the percentage of total AR collected.

• For example, a company may know that its 10-year average of bad debt is 2.4%.
• As much as you would love to collect on every invoice you issue, that doesn’t always happen.
• Using the double-entry accounting method, a business records the amount of money the customers owe it in an Account Receivable Account.
• Incorrect AR data also cripples accrual accounting processes, leading to false revenue and cash flow figures.
• Multiplying the default rate with the total AR will give you an estimate of bad debt expense.
• The most prevalent approach — called the “percent of sales method” — uses a pre-determined percentage of total sales assumption to forecast the uncollectible credit sales.

The allowance for doubtful accounts is then used to approximate the percentage of “uncollectible” accounts receivable (A/R). AR aging reports are complicated to compile and need input from a range of data sources. Accounts receivable automation software simplifies this task by automatically pulling collections data and classifying receivables by age. You can use three methods to calculate an appropriate allowance for doubtful accounts. Each of these methods suits different businesses and one is not necessarily better than the other. Every business is unique, and AFDA standards are not widely available.

Method 3: Customer risk classification

Note that the debit to the allowance for doubtful accounts reduces the balance in this account because contra assets have a natural credit balance. Also, note that when writing off the specific account, no income statement accounts are used. This is because the expense was already taken when creating or adjusting the allowance.

Customers might short pay their invoices, raise disputes that delay payments, declare bankruptcy, etc. A contra account is an asset account that is used to offset a parent account – in this case, the accounts receivable. Though the Pareto Analysis can not be used on its own, it can be used to weigh accounts receivable estimates differently. For example, a company may assign a heavier weight to the clients that make up a larger balance of accounts receivable due to conservatism. In addition to these broader assessments, dig into your aging receivables data to find answers.

The following entry should be done in accordance with your revenue and reporting cycles (recording the expense in the same reporting period as the revenue is earned), but at a minimum, annually. Accounts use this method of estimating the allowance to adhere to the matching principle. The matching principle states that revenue and expenses must be recorded in the same period in which they occur.

Get instant access to video lessons taught by experienced investment bankers. Learn financial statement modeling, DCF, M&A, LBO, Comps and Excel shortcuts. GAAP since the expense is recognized in a different period as when the revenue was earned. GAAP allows for this provision to mitigate the risk of volatility in share price movements caused by sudden changes on the balance sheet, which is the A/R balance in this context.

Example of a Bad Debt and Doubtful Debt

The term also refers to an account that may become a bad debt in the future but hasn’t yet reached the point where it can be written off, or otherwise referred to as a reserve. Managing doubtful debt is an ongoing challenge for businesses of all kinds. In some cases, you may write off the money a customer owed you in your books only for them to come back and pay you. If a customer ends up paying (e.g., a collection agency collects their payment) and you have already written off the money they owed, you need to reverse the account.

• Then, decrease your ADA account by crediting your Allowance for Doubtful Accounts account.
• As you can tell, there are a few moving parts when it comes to allowance for doubtful accounts journal entries.
• Therefore, it can assign this fixed percentage to its total accounts receivable balance since more often than not, it will approximately be close to this amount.
• Allowance for doubtful accounts helps companies account for unpaid invoices.
• For example, a company has $70,000 of accounts receivable less than 30 days outstanding and $30,000 of accounts receivable more than 30 days outstanding.

In accordance with GAAP revenue recognition policies, the company must still record credit sales (i.e. not cash) as revenue on the income statement and accounts receivable on the balance sheet. The allowance for doubtful accounts (or the “bad debt” reserve) appears on the balance sheet to anticipate credit sales where the customer cannot fulfill their payment obligations. They are the accounts receivable aging method and percentage of sales methods. The aggregate balance in the allowance for doubtful accounts after these two periods is $5,400.

Microsoft Allowance for Doubtful Accounts Example

The business will also create a bad debt reserve – also known as an allowance for doubtful accounts – to reflect the estimation for uncollectible or bad debts. Creating a bad debt reserve reduces the accounts receivable on a company’s balance sheet. The company now has a better idea of which account receivables will be collected and which will be lost.

Allowance for doubtful accounts is a balance sheet account and is listed as a contra asset. When you eventually identify an actual bad debt, write it off (as described above for a bad debt) by debiting the allowance for doubtful accounts and crediting the accounts receivable account. And, having a lot of bad debts drives down the amount of revenue your business should have. By predicting the amount of accounts receivables customers won’t pay, you can anticipate your losses from bad debts. Under the direct write-off method, a business will debit bad debt expense and credit accounts receivable immediately when it determines an invoice to be uncollectible. In contrast, under the allowance method, a business will make an estimate of which receivables they think will be uncollectable, usually at the end of the year.

What is a Bad Debt?

Though this allowance for doubtful accounts is presented on the balance sheet with other assets, it is a contra asset that reduces the balance of total assets. When customers don’t pay you, your bad debts expenses account increases. A bad debt is debt that you have officially written off as uncollectible.

You’ll notice the allowance account has a natural credit balance and will increase when credited. Assume a company has 100 clients and believes there are 11 accounts that may go uncollected. Instead of applying percentages or weights, it may simply aggregate the account balance for all 11 customers and use that figure as the allowance amount.

In other words, AFDA is an estimate while BDE records the actual impact of uncollectibles. In the AR aging method of calculating AFDA, you assign a default risk percentage to each AR aging bracket. In the customer risk classification method, you instead assign each customer a default risk percentage. You can examine historical payment collection data for a customer and calculate the percentage of invoices on which they tend to default.