How to fix journal entries moving income to expense accounts
End-of-year journal entries moving funds from income into expense accounts and unclassified service revenue distort financial statements and risk compliance during CPA reviews. These misclassifications prevent accurate tracking of deferred revenue and leave internal staff unprepared when communicating adjustments to external auditors.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Relying on annual CPA reviews to catch errors
- 2Accepting non-compliant cash accounting methods
- 3treating the invoice as an obligation and recording it as a liability until paid
- 4Making journal entries to move the debt out of accounts payable into its own liability account
- 5Requesting loan statements and amortization schedules to reconcile principal and interest portions
- 6Remapping booked revenue to actual ship dates to calculate the true financial and EBITDA impact
- 7Raising the issue multiple times to management despite initial pushback
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I raised this before and got waved off.”source ↗
“The responses have been that it's been through two audits, that it's just a timing difference, and that shipment-based recognition may be harder operationally.”source ↗
“We have expired products being returned/adjusted, but there is **no physical stock movement**. We only have an invoice/document showing the value.”source ↗
“I just learn that our accountant was making an end of year journal entry to move funds from our income account to that expense account.”source ↗
“Secondly, I also learned that we have about $30,000 in service revenue, that should be classified as deferred revenue.”source ↗
“the only problem is, is that our accountant doesn't even know about the misclassification of the $30,000, so when she meets with the CPA who does our review, she is not going to know anything about this.”source ↗
“When we received the cash the entry was debit cash and credit accounts payable. There is no long term debt account, nor is there an interest expense account.”source ↗
“My question now is on what financial report would I see the balance due on that loan? It’s not on the balance sheet nor the trial balance.”source ↗
Where this came up
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