Some money arrives or leaves in one month and belongs to several. Insurance paid for a year. A deposit taken for a job that runs until spring.
Find it at Accounting → Prepaid & Deferred.
The two cases
A cost you paid up front. You pay $12,000 in January for a year of liability insurance. That is not a January cost. Booking it whole makes January look catastrophic and the next eleven months look better than they are, which sends you chasing a problem that does not exist while missing one that does.
Money you took for work not done. A customer pays $10,000 up front on an install that runs four months. That is not yet revenue. You are holding their money against work you still owe. Counting it as income says you earned it, and prices your next job off a margin that was never real.
What happens when you set one up
Omnyra already has the payment — the bank line, the bill, or the invoice put the whole amount through your profit and loss when it happened. Setting up a deferral takes that amount back out and parks it:
- A prepaid expense becomes an asset. You have paid for something you have not used yet.
- Deferred revenue becomes a liability. You are holding money against work still owed.
Then each month, one month's worth moves back onto the profit and loss.
No money moves. This does not touch your cash, because the cash already moved. It only decides which months the amount belongs to.
Two dates, and why they differ
Date paid is when the money actually moved. Cover starts is the first month it applies to.
They are usually the same and sometimes not. A premium paid on 28 December for the year ahead moved in December and covers from January. Omnyra reverses the December cost in December, so December is not left overstated and January is not left short.
Posting the months
A month that has not finished is a forecast. It shows on the schedule and reaches no report.
Once a month has ended, it is ready. Open the item and post it. The screen leads with how many months have ended and are still waiting, because each one is a month whose profit and loss is missing a cost or carrying income it did not earn.
Posting twice does nothing the second time, so a repeated click or a retry cannot double-charge a month.
The arithmetic
$10,000 over 12 months does not divide evenly. Eleven months take $833.33 and the last one takes $833.37.
The last month absorbs the odd cents deliberately. Spreading them around leaves monthly figures nobody can reproduce, and dropping them leaves a few cents stranded on your balance sheet forever. This way the schedule adds up to exactly what you paid.
Stopping one
If a policy is canceled or a job falls through, stop it and give a reason.
Months already posted stay posted. They have journal entries behind them and your books have moved; unwinding them would change a month you may have already filed against.
Whatever has not been recognized is written off at that point rather than left sitting on your balance sheet as an asset for a policy that no longer exists. If a refund comes later, record it as its own transaction.
Where it shows up
Everything here posts as a journal entry, so it is visible in the general ledger like any other entry, and the unreleased balance sits on your balance sheet under Prepaid Expenses or Deferred Revenue.
This only affects accrual reporting. On a cash basis the money counted when it moved, and spreading it would misstate that basis. See accrual and cash.