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In finance, bad debt, occasionally called uncollectible accounts expense, is a monetary amount owed to a creditor that is unlikely to be paid and for which the creditor is not willing to take action to collect for various reasons, often due to the debtor not having the money to pay, for example due to a company going into liquidation or insolvency.
Accounts receivable represents money owed by entities to the firm on the sale of products or services on credit. In most business entities, accounts receivable is typically executed by generating an invoice and either mailing or electronically delivering it to the customer, who, in turn, must pay it within an established timeframe, called credit terms [citation needed] or payment terms.
Factoring is commonly referred to as accounts receivable factoring, invoice factoring, and sometimes accounts receivable financing. Accounts receivable financing is a term more accurately used to describe a form of asset based lending against accounts receivable. The Commercial Finance Association is the leading trade association of the asset ...
A company's earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (commonly abbreviated EBITDA, [1] pronounced / ˈ iː b ɪ t d ɑː,-b ə-, ˈ ɛ-/ [2]) is a measure of a company's profitability of the operating business only, thus before any effects of indebtedness, state-mandated payments, and costs required to maintain its asset base.
The fundamental components of the accounting equation include the calculation of both company holdings and company debts; thus, it allows owners to gauge the total value of a firm's assets. However, because accounting is kept on a historical basis, the equity is typically not the net worth of the organization.
The cash flow statement differs from the balance sheet and income statement in that it excludes non-cash transactions required by accrual basis accounting, such as depreciation, deferred income taxes, write-offs on bad debts and sales on credit where receivables have not yet been collected. [5] The cash flow statement is intended to: [6] [7] [8]
A third classification of adjusting entry occurs where the exact amount of an expense cannot easily be determined. The depreciation of fixed assets, for example, is an expense which has to be estimated. The entry for bad debt expense can also be classified as an estimate.
In particular, firms need to choose the method that "least likely overstates assets and income or understates liabilities and losses" [3] when encountering accounting issues. For example, if the staff believe there will be 2% bad debt in terms of receivables based on historical information and another staff believe there will be 5% because of a ...