Last year, Uber reported revenue numbers that dropped to half of their usual profits. Retailers like Amazon, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart expect a rise in revenue numbers by hundreds of millions of dollars. While many different factors affect revenue numbers, the single reason for these swings are new accounting rules. If you’re in charge of sales operations, commissions, product offerings, IT, legal and of course finance or accounting, you are experiencing the biggest change in accounting in the last 15 years.
The new accounting rules ASC 606 in the U.S., and its international counterpart IFRS 15, standardize and simplify revenue recognition across all industries. Revenue recognition is an accounting principle that determines what a company claims as revenue from the cash received in bookings, which of course, signifies a company’s profitability to shareholders, investors, and customers. Continue reading