Adjusting Entries: Unearned Revenue - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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Sometimes customers pay us before we deliver any goods or services. These payments are Unearned Revenues. Unearned Revenues are also called Deferred Revenues.
Alright. Our next adjusting entry is related to unearned revenue. Let's check it out. So remember adjusting entries they include the deferrals, the accruals and depreciation. We're still talking about deferrals at this point. Okay, so unearned revenue is going to be a deferral type adjusting entry. So let's discuss what is unearned revenue. This is when we receive cash from the customer before delivering goods and services to the customer. So this is where the customer pays us in advance, right? The cash is received, but we haven't done anything for them yet. Right. So what do you think this is? Think about, think about those that technicality, their unearned revenues. What kind of account is that? So think of the situation, this situation, the customer's given us money. We've received money from the customer but we haven't done anything for them yet. In this case we owe them a service, right? They've paid us for something. And in the future we're gonna have to do that something for them. So since we owe them something, since we have to do something for the customer, we have a liability, unearned revenues are liabilities because we have received from the customer, right? But we have not performed for them yet. Okay, So we are liable to perform whatever we need to do for the customer. So just like everything else we've got these two important dates. So let's think about the important dates. And let's start here in the blue boxes and then we'll talk about the cash basis to a cruel in the next video for the red boxes. Okay, so let's start here. The first date is the cash receipt date. This is the day that the customer actually pays you even though you haven't done anything for them yet. Okay. So on January 15, a student paid the tutor $1,000 in advance for 20 hours of tutoring. Okay. So we're gonna think of it from the tutors perspective, not from the student's perspective. We're thinking from the tutor, the business, they received $1000 Right? So he received $1000. So he's gonna debit cash, right? He received $1000. But what about the credit? The credit isn't going to be revenue. We haven't done anything for the customer yet. All we did was received this money. So we're going to credit unearned revenue. Right? And this is a liability because at some future date we're going to have to tutor this student and he's not gonna pay us any more money. He already paid us. Right? So this unearned revenue is we're gonna earn it as we tutor the student. Cool. So that would be our entry debit cash for 1000. Because we received cash and credit unearned revenue. A liability which we will Uh earn over time as we tutor the student. So here we go on the adjusting date at just the unearned revenue account based on the amount of revenue earned, right? So there was a bunch of unearned revenue, but we're going to earn some of it as we perform our service. So on January 31, the students still had eight hours of tutoring prepaid. So notice they could tell you this a few different ways. They can tell you how many hours the students used up, or they can tell you how many hours are left, right? They told us in this case there's eight hours left, so we can infer that from the 20 hours that they paid for, minus the eight hours left. Well there were 12 hours used up, right? He used up 12 of those prepaid hours. So from our perspective, the tutors perspective, we've earned revenue for 12 hours of work, right? There's still eight hours of work. We still have to perform, but there's 12 hours that we've earned. Right? So the one more thing we need to know is how much revenue do we get per hour? Let's do that up here. We had $1000 paid to us for 20 hours of tutoring, right? $1000 divided by 20. Well that's gonna give us $50 an hour, right? $50 an hour for that private tutoring man clutches, sounding like a great deal now. Huh? Alright. So $50 per hour and they've used up 12 hours of their tutoring, Right? So 50 times 12 I'm gonna do it right up here. Uh $50 times the 12 that they've used up is going to be 600 right? So 600 is the revenue that we've earned. We've tutored the student for 12 hours, we've earned $600 of this revenue. So we are going to, in this case debit are unearned revenue, right? Because since we performed for this customer, our liability to them is less, right? We've performed a lot of this for them. So there's no way we still owe them $1000 worth of services we owe them less. We need to decrease that by the 600. So this debit to unearned revenue is decreasing the balance from 1000 down to 400 right? 1000 minus the 600. And then we earned revenue. So we're gonna have a credit to revenue for 600 Right? This is revenue that we actually earned. And notice that this revenue 600 that is the 12 hours times the $50. Right? So that is the revenue we've earned so far. And that is going to be our total revenue down here. 600 our unearned revenue. Well, that's the 1000 minus the 600 we've earned. There's still 400 and unearned revenue. So if you're gonna show our balance sheet there would be a liability on the balance sheet, uh for $400 in unearned revenue. Cool, let's pause here and then we'll do the cash basis to a cruel in these red boxes on the right
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Adjusting Entries: Unearned Revenue (Cash Basis to Accrual Method)
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Alright. So let's start with the cash basis to a cruel method over here on the right. So I'm just gonna write that in here cash basis to a cruel, so remember from a cash basis, we earn our revenue when that cash is received, right? We received $1000 in cash. Hey, we're feeling good. We earned that revenue. So cash would go up 1000 right? We received 1000 in cash. But we're gonna directly credit our revenue. We're gonna say we earned all this revenue already from a cash basis, Right? And you can see why that's a little trickier when we think about it in the in the long term. So the idea here is that We've earned revenue of 1000, right? But from an accrual basis, we didn't earn all that revenue yet, right? We need to adjust that down to the correct amount. So the correct amount in this case is again going to be the same amount, the same logic that we used in our other sex, in the other section where we had $1,000 earned divided by the 20, gave us a $50 an hour rate, right? And we found out that there were 12 hours that we actually tutored them, right. The students still had eight hours of tutoring pre paid, they paid for 20. So that means they had to use up 12 of them. So what does that tell us? It tells us that our revenue should actually be this 600 right? The 600 which was the $50 an hour times the $12 used up or c 12 hours used up. That should be the amount of revenue we actually earned. But what does it say? Our revenue is right now. Our revenue is currently sitting at 1000 we need to bring it down to 600. Right? So since revenues go up with the credit, they go down with a debit. So we're going to debit revenue For 400 in this case, right? Because it was at 1000 and we need to bring it down to 600. So we're going to debit it by 400. That brings the revenue account to a credit balance of 600, which is what we want right? The amount we've earned. And what about this? 400? Well this is unearned revenue right? We got paid for this 400 but we haven't earned it yet. And that's that same 400 for those eight hours that are still not used up. Okay, so our revenue account is sitting at that 1000 minus the 400 which gets us to the correct balance of 600 in this case. And our unearned revenue, we didn't touch till sorry until here at the end Where we got a credit balance of 400. So notice in both cases on the left and the right, we got to the same final revenue and unearned revenue balances. Alright, let's go ahead and move on to the next video
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Problem
In May, the Party Company received $4,000 as a deposit for a party that was occurring in November. In October, the Party Company received a $5,000 deposit for a party occurring in February of the following year. The company recorded both of these payments into the Unearned Revenue account and did not adjust the account after recording the payments. The adjusting entry at December 31 would include: