Suspense Account: Definition, Example, Creation, and Close Notes with PDF Trial Balance

If you don’t know who made the payment, look at your outstanding customer invoices and find which one matches the payment amount. Contact the customer to verify that it’s their payment and the right invoice. If the credits in the trial balance are larger than debits, record the difference as a debit. If the debits are larger than credits, record the difference as a credit. If you do not know who made the payment, review the open invoices to try to match up the payment.

• However, in your day-to-day business activities, using a suspense account in accounting is much like placing a document on a “to file” pile.
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• Unmatched amounts are clearly indicated, meaning you can go back and match them easily once you know where they belong.

If you don’t know where to put money, then keep it in a suspense account until you can talk to an accountant and find out. If you are purchasing an asset that you will not receive until you have paid in full, payment instalments can be placed in a suspense account and moved to an asset account when completed. Designed for freelancers and small business owners, Debitoor invoicing software makes it quick and easy to issue professional invoices and manage your business finances. If you have taken over the accountancy for a company and they have a suspense account it is important to ensure that these amounts are explained, identified, and finally removed and placed in the correct account.

In balance sheet terms, a suspense account is not ideal, as it can prevent you from accurately balancing the books. However, in your day-to-day business activities, using a suspense account in accounting is much like placing a document on a “to file” pile. It is useful to have a suspense account, rather than not recording transactions at all until there is sufficient information available to create an entry to the correct account(s). Otherwise, larger unreported transactions may not be recorded by the end of a reporting period, resulting in inaccurate financial results. Similar to the other types of suspense accounts, brokerage suspense accounts temporarily hold funds while transactions are completed.

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You credit the suspense account and add a debit to the supplies department to close the account. A suspense account’s general purpose is to have somewhere how the coronavirus is affecting small business to keep the money until you process it. Ensure that you close the account after moving the last of the money to the appropriate permanent account.

Whether new to BlackLine or a longtime customer, we curate events to guide you along every step of your modern accounting journey. Improve the prioritization of customer calls, reduce days sales outstanding, and watch productivity rise with more dynamic, accurate, and smarter collection management processes. Streamline and automate detail-heavy reconciliations, such as bank reconciliations, credit card matching, intercompany reconciliations, and invoice-to-PO matching all in one centralized workspace. If you’re unsure about where to enter a transaction, open a suspense account and talk to your accountant. A customer paid $1,000 in cash without specifying which invoice the payment relates to.

She also thinks there may be other errors which occurred that did not involve a suspense account. Suspense accounts and error correction are popular topics for examiners because they test candidates’ understanding of bookkeeping principles so well. A suspense account is a temporary holding account for a bookkeeping entry that will end up somewhere else once the final and correct account is determined.

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However, suspense accounts are temporary accounts that must be closed by the end of your accounting cycle. This is why accountants and bookkeepers make suspense account journal entries — to still keep track of ambiguous payments while avoiding the mistake of recording transactions in the wrong accounts. Once the anomaly is cleared up, the correct account can be credited properly, thus averting inaccurate financial results.

Finally, internal bookkeeping errors, such as overstated or understated balances, duplicate entries, or incomplete or partial entries are recorded in the suspense account until the error can be adjusted. Your success is our success.From onboarding to financial operations excellence, our customer success management team helps you unlock measurable value. Through workshops, webinars, digital success options, tips and tricks, and more, you will develop leading-practice processes and strategies to propel your organization forward. While the responsibility to maintain compliance stretches across the organization, F&A has a critical role in ensuring compliance with financial rules and regulations. Together with expanding roles, new expectations from stakeholders, and evolving regulatory requirements, these demands can place unsustainable strain on finance and accounting functions.

Having been correctly identified, the interest expense account now contains the correct amount of 1,000. The suspense account maintains the double entry at the time of posting when the correct account is unknown. Subsequently when the business determines the transaction classification it transfers the amount from the suspense account to the correct account. The suspense account in accounting is a general ledger account used to make temporary unclassified transaction postings until the correct classification can be determined using transaction analysis. In any case, every effort should be made to eliminate all unidentified transactions held in the suspense account by the end of the fiscal year, otherwise the annual financial statements will be inaccurate. Even if there is no timeline set by regulatory authorities for the clear-out process, businesses routinely carry out monthly or quarterly suspense account reconciliations.

Because this payment isn’t in full, it doesn’t have a direct correlation on the balance sheet as it won’t match revenue, inventory or expenses. It will be moved onto the ledger once the commission has been paid in full following the completion of work. However, all that being said, due to how suspense accounts work, it may often be hard to determine the nature of the entry accurately enough to use the categories above. In this case, you may choose to have a single suspense account entry until you figure out where the transaction should be recorded. In case a suspense a/c is not closed at the end of an accounting period, the balance in suspense account is shown on the asset side of a balance sheet if it is a “Debit balance”. In case of a “Credit balance”, it is shown on the liability side of a balance sheet.

The expense suspense account

Without entering such transactions, there may be transactions that are not recorded by the end of a reporting period, resulting in inaccurate financial results. Working capital, cash flows, collections opportunities, and other critical metrics depend on timely and accurate processes. Ensure services revenue has been accurately recorded and related payments are reflected properly on the balance sheet.

Departmental budgets

You’ll need to open an account in the general ledger to account for suspense account journal entries. Don’t forget to include another entry with the same amount in another account. Whether intentional or accidental, partial payments can be tricky to match up to invoices. You can hold them in a suspense account until you know which account they should move to. On 1 September 20X8, Michelle had a balance outstanding owed to one of her suppliers of $400. That supplier also had a balance outstanding owed to Michelle of $500.

Make the most of your team’s time by automating accounts receivables tasks and using data to drive priority, action, and results. Understand customer data and performance behaviors to minimize the risk of bad debt and the impact of late payments. Monitor changes in real time to identify and analyze customer risk signals.

For example, payments may be received with invalid or unclear account information. Other details may also be unclear, such as the amount of the transaction or the payee. Once the accountant has enough information, they can reassign the transaction out of the suspense account and into the appropriate account within the general ledger. Our API-first development strategy gives you the keys to integrate your finance tech stack – from one ERP to one hundred – and create seamless data flows in and out of BlackLine. Explore the future of accounting over a cup of coffee with our curated collection of white papers and ebooks written to help you consider how you will transform your people, process, and technology. World-class support so you can focus on what matters most.BlackLine provides global product support across geographies, languages, and time zones, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

Suspense account example

With accounting in small businesses, suspense accounts are regularly cleared out. Moving money out of the suspense account and putting it where it needs to bring the balance down to zero. A suspense account is a general ledger account in which amounts are temporarily recorded. The suspense account is used because the appropriate general ledger account could not be determined at the time that the transaction was recorded.

Example #1: Receiving a partial payment

Businesses with lots of transactions, particularly ones involving staff who are not financially trained, may find they need to use a suspense account more frequently. Lobek notes that now the company uses software to scan invoices, receipts and bills, it is far easier to keep track of transactions. You may get partial payments from customers and wonder whether you should invoice it or not. Hold on to the money and store it in your suspense account until after contacting the customer. You can move the funds to the appropriate account and close the suspense account when you get the total amount. For the purposes of the exam, any errors which must be identified and corrected will be realistic in terms of a computerised accounting system.

Global and regional advisory and consulting firms bring deep finance domain expertise, process transformation leadership, and shared passion for customer value creation to our joint customers. Our consulting partners help guide large enterprise and midsize organizations undergoing digital transformation by maximizing and accelerating value from BlackLine’s solutions. The revenue cycle refers to the entirety of a company’s ordering process from the time an order is placed until an invoice is paid and settled.