Why does my deferred revenue balance not reconcile as expected?

If you are using the ScaleXP deferred revenue journal and find that your balance sheet or revenue are not matching as expected, read more here. 

ScaleXP's deferred revenue journal page (on the Journals tab, open Deferred Revenue Journal from Month-End Close) provides a comparison of both the expected revenue amounts (Section 6: Revenue Recognition) and the expected vs accounting system balance sheet (Section 5: Balance Sheet Reconciliation). 

If you find that the amounts in your accounting system are not matching with the amounts calculated by ScaleXP, there are several possible reasons for this. 

For the monthly posting flow, see Deferred revenue 2: Review and post the journal; account filters and mapping - the most common cause of differences - are covered in Deferred revenue 1: Map and filter your accounts.

1. Your opening balance sheets do not match. See How to adjust the starting balance sheet for deferred revenue.
2. You have not selected all the relevant P&L and balance sheet accounts in Included Data when calculating your journal in ScaleXP (it is important to select all the mapped deferred revenue liability accounts as well as their matching P&L accounts here, but not any accrued income asset accounts).
3. You have other manual journals impacting these accounts.  You can see these in the totals in Section 3: Journals already posted this month. (If ScaleXP is not expecting these journals, it will effectively be telling you to reverse them out.)
4. You switched to Journals by customer after posting journals by account for the same month (or the other way round). ScaleXP doesn't recognize the earlier journals and will suggest reversing them. Remove them in your ledger and sync — see How to set up revenue journals by customer.
5. You have un-invoiced revenue in your P&L accounts, resulting in a different revenue figure for the month than what ScaleXP is expecting based on invoices alone.  See this article on How to add a manual invoice to match revenue recognition to your accounting system 

Your journals should use the IFRS / GAAP method, so backdated revenue is recognized in the month the invoice is issued. If Journal Calculation in Revenue Journal Settings shows Revenue Recognition (by service dates), your suggested journal may include backdated revenue in prior periods. Contact [email protected] to change it. See How to set journals to IFRS or GAAP rules for backdated revenue.