Revenue recognition is one of the key issues accountants have to deal with on a regular basis. It’s usually straightforward for a merchandiser, but when should revenue be recognized when the company accepts a contract that will take several months to several years to complete? In this article, we’ll discuss two methods for recognizing revenue from contracts.

In this article, we’ll discuss progress billings, one of the facets of accounting for long-term contracts. More than just a record of invoices sent to the client, the amount of billings determine, in part, what appears on the balance sheet.

Corporate bonds are bought and sold in secondary financial markets around the world. This begs the question – can a company purchase its own bonds just like it can purchase its own stock?

You’re probably familiar with cash and stock dividends. What you may not know is that there are a few additional types of dividends that can be declared for stockholders. In this article, we’ll touch on property dividends, scrip dividends, and DRIP arrangements.

Most businesses use fixed assets which are typically depreciated. Such depreciation can be classified as direct or indirect expense. How can one distinguish between the two? In this article we will discuss this question and provide examples.

In this article, we’ll cover appropriation, a process by which the board of directors lets shareholders know that funds have been internally restricted.

Depreciation might sound simple in theory - the company buys a fixed asset and then writes off the cost over a period of time. But what if a company has hundreds or thousands of depreciable assets, each with its own cost, salvage value, and useful life? What if a particular machine has several dozen separate parts that must be replaced at different times? Situations like this call for specialized methods of depreciation.

In the first two parts of this article series, we discussed general capital lease accounting. For this final article, we’ll take a brief look at a special kind of transaction called a sale-leaseback.

In the first part of this article series about capital lease accounting, we discussed accounting for the asset and related liability from the perspective of the lessee. Now we’ll turn to other side of the transaction to look at accounting from the lessor’s perspective.

In this three-part article series, we’ll discuss the accounting treatment for various aspects of a leasing arrangement. This first part will cover capital lease accounting by the lessee (the party that takes possession of an asset in exchange for monthly lease payments).