Deferred expenses: Theory and practice of accounting
Subject. This article examines the issues related to the operations of deferred expenses for the relevance and necessity of applying a special procedure for attributing costs that may belong to future periods, to the expenses of the reporting period. Objectives. The article aims to find a logically verified methodology for accounting for costs related to the current and future periods and their reflection in the financial statements. Methods. For the study, I used a systems approach and logical generalization. Results. The study shows that in the organizations’ business life, there are cases of a need to accumulate certain types of costs on a special account with their subsequent write-off for expenses in the periods when these costs begin to bring economic benefits. Such costs must be significant in amount and be of an investment nature. Otherwise, there are risks of the accrual principle (assumption) violation. Conclusions and Relevance. The accounting regulator in the Russian Federation needs to make adjustments to the regulatory documents that determine the procedure for classification, accounting and disclosure of information in the accounting (financial) statements, providing in the first section of the financial position report an unambiguously interpreted item for deferred expenses not attributable to the reporting years, as well as related information in other forms of accounting (financial) statements. Adjustments also need to be made to existing accounting provisions to eliminate conflicts and discrepancies with respect to deferred expenses. The results of the study are intended to develop theoretical views on the methodology of accounting for costs and expenses of organizations and the promotion in practice of this approach to the classification of costs between current and deferred expenses.