B2B SaaS Revenue Recognition Excel Template

Description
Provide leaders at businesses that sell annual SaaS or software subscriptions with a simple tool for managing their revenue recognition needs.

This template is intended to be very straightforward with reasonable flexibility for various common billing frequencies.

To recognize subscription revenue properly, it is important to track four key amounts:

1. New Deferred, Unbilled - While it is up to you to decide whether or not you want to track this in your ledger (the decision depends on the nature of your contracts), this is the amount of money under contract with a new customer but has yet to be billed.

2. New Deferred, Billed - As you bill a customer against a given sales order, this is the amount that moves from Unbilled Deferred Revenue to Billed Deferred Revenue

3. Recognized Revenue - Once a subscription has commenced and is recognizable revenue, this is the amount of revenue you debit from Deferred, Billed and credit to Revenue Recognized (and appears on your Income Statement).

4. Ending Deferred Billed - This is your check to make sure your revenue is correctly flowing from your Balance Sheet to the Income Statement. It is the ending balance that has been billed but not yet recognized.

Good luck!

And with all accounting, please seek the advice of a certified accounting professional should you have any questions. This template is intended to be a guilde for those who already have some familiarity with recognizing software revenue.