Accrued liability
In accounting, accrued liability means an obligation for goods or services received but not yet invoiced or paid — wages, interest, professional fees — recorded by an accrual.
- Layer
- Lexicon
- Defined in
- Lexicon
- Nearby
- 4
Authority
This definition follows ASC 405.
Every citation in this system, with the text we read and the date we checked it, is in US GAAP and where these rules come from.
The lesson that teaches this
Accounting, 0 to 1 — a free course taught end to end on one month of one company, with the spreadsheet exercises to work it yourself.
Accrued liability, in use
Quoted from the document that use the word — what it does to an interface, in the spec's own sentence.
Coding the invoice against the accrued liability also works, but depends on someone remembering; auto-reversal removes that dependency.
Schedules, accruals & roll-forwards — 3. Accrued liabilities
What it is not called
Each of these is a real word for a different thing. Using it here is what makes a product read as though it was built by someone who has not done the work.
- accrued AP
- provision (a provision is an uncertain estimate)
Nearby in the catalog
No component names this concept outright. These are the ones in its part of the system, which is a weaker claim — but a component nothing links to is a component nobody finds.
6Statements
Family specTerms this one depends on
Also in Close
Work with this concept
The calculators that compute it and the ledger payloads that carry it. A definition is where a reader starts; these are where they go next.
- Accrued expenses vs accounts payableAccrued expenses are costs incurred that no bill has arrived for yet; accounts payable are bills received and approved but not yet paid — both are liabilities, separated by whether the vendor's invoice exists.Compare
- Prepaid expense vs accrued expenseA prepaid expense is cash paid before the cost is used, an asset; an accrued expense is a cost used before it is paid or billed, a liability — the same timing difference running in opposite directions.Compare
- Journal entry for accrued expensesAt month-end, debit the expense and credit Accrued expenses for work received but not yet billed. Reverse the accrual on the first day of the next month, then book the vendor's bill as usual when it arrives.Entry
- Journal entry for accrued wagesAt month-end, debit Wages and salaries and credit Accrued wages for the days worked since the last payday. On payday, reverse the accrual or debit Accrued wages for the part of the payroll it covers.Entry
- Journal entry for accrued interestAt month-end, debit Interest expense and credit Accrued interest for the interest earned by the lender since the last payment. When the payment is made, debit Accrued interest and credit Cash.Entry
Defined in Lexicon. This page is generated from that document, so the two cannot disagree.