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Recurring Revenue generally reflects a tranche of a company’s revenue, which is expected to continue in the future and is usually predictable with some degree of confidence. Some of the sources through which a company recognises the recurring revenue are, auto-renewable subscription, sunk money subscriptions, hard contracts, etc.
What is accounts payable? Accounts Payable (AP) is an obligation that an individual or a company has to fulfill for purchasing goods and services bought from their suppliers and vendors. AP refers to the amount that is not paid upfront and can be paid back in a short period of time. Hence, a good or a service purchased on credit to be paid in a short period will fall under AP. For individuals, AP may include the bill paid after availing services such as television network, electricity, internet connection, or telephone. Most of the time, the bill is generated after the designated billing period, depending upon the amount of consumption. The customers have to pay this obligation within a stipulated time to avoid default. What is accounts payable from a Company’s point of View? AP is the amount of money a company is liable to pay to its suppliers or vendors and clear dues for purchases of goods and services purchased from its suppliers or vendors. AP is required to be repaid in a short period, depending on the relationship with suppliers. It is essentially a kind of short-term debt, which is necessary to honour to prevent default. As the current liabilities of the company, AP is required to be settled over the next twelve months. It is presented in the balance sheet as the account payable balance. For example, Entity A buys goods from Entity B for US$400,000.00 on Credit. Entity A has to pay back this amount within 60 days. Entity A will record US$400,000.00 as AP while Entity B will record the same amount as Account receivable. AP is also a part of the cash flow statement. The change in the total AP over a period is shown in the cash flow statement, hence it is part of the company’s working capital. It is widely used in analysing the cash flow of the business and cash flow trends over a period. AP may also depict the bargaining power of the company with its vendor and suppliers. A vendor or supplier may give the customer a longer credit period to settle the cash compared to other customers. The customer here is the company, which will incur AP after buying goods on credit from the vendor. There could be many reasons why the vendor is providing a more extended credit period to the firm such as long-term relationship, bargaining power of the firm, strategic needs of the vendor, the scale of goods or services. By maintaining a more extended repayment period to supplier and shorter cash realisation period from the customer, the company would be able to improve the working capital cycle and need funds to support the business-as-usual. However, prudent working capital management calls for not overtly stretching the payable days as it might lead to dissatisfaction of supplier. Also, investors tend to closely watch the payable days cycle to determine the financial health of the business. When the financial conditions of a firm deteriorate, the management tends to delay the payment to their suppliers. Why accounts payable is an important part of Balance sheet and Cash Flow Statement? As inferred from the previous paragraphs, AP is part of the current liabilities of the balance sheet. This is an obligatory debt that has to be paid back within a time frame so that the company does not default. AP primarily consists of payments to be made to suppliers. If AP keeps on increasing over a period of time, it can be said that the company is purchasing goods or services on credit more, instead of paying up front. If AP decreases, it means the company is reducing its previous debts more than it is buying goods on credit. Managing AP is essential to have a stable cash flow. In a cash flow statement prepared through an indirect method, the net difference in AP is shown under cash flow from operating activities. The business entity can use AP to create the desired variation in the cash flow to some extent. For example, to increase cash reserves, management can increase the duration of paying back the credit taken for a certain period, thus affecting the net difference in AP. What Is the Role of Accounts Payable Department? Every company has an accounts payable department and the size and structure depend upon how big or small the enterprise is. The AP department is formed based on the estimated number of suppliers, vendors, and service providers the company is expected to interact with; the amount of payment volume that would be processed in a given period of time; and the nature of reports that a management will require. For example, a tiny firm with a low volume of purchase transactions may require a simple or a basic accounts payable process. However, a medium or a large enterprise may have a accounts payable department that may require a set of practices to be followed before paying back the credit. What is the Accounts Payable Process? Guidelines or a process is important as it provides transparency and smoothness in facilitating the volume of transactions in any time period. The process involves: Bill receipt: when goods were bought, a bill records the quantity of goods received and the amount that needs to be paid to the vendors. Assessing the bill details: to ensure that the bill or invoice copy includes the name of the vendor, authorization, date of the purchase made and to verify the requirements regarding the purchase order. Updating book of records after the bill is collected: Ledger accounts need to be revised on the basis of bills received. The department makes an expense entry after taking approval from management. Timely payment processing: the department takes care of all payments that need to be processed on or before their due date as mentioned on a bill. The department prepares and verifies all the required documents. All details entered on the cheque along with bank account details of the vendor, payment vouchers, the purchase order, and the original bill and purchase order are scrutinized. The department also takes care of the safety of the company’s cash and assets and prevents: reimbursing a fake invoice reimbursing an incorrect invoice making double payment of the same vendor invoice Apart from making supplier payments, AP departments also takes care of travel expenses, making internal payments, maintaining records of vendor payments, and reducing costs Business Travel Expenses: Bigger entities or firms whose business nature requires all personnel to travel, have their AP department manage their travel costs. The AP department manages the personnel’s travel by making advance payments to travel companies including airlines and car rentals and making hotel reservations. An account payable department may also deals with requests and fund distribution to cover travel costs. After business travel, AP may also be responsible for settling funds supplied versus actual funds spent. Internal Payments: The Accounts Payable department takes care of internal reimbursement payments distribution, controlling and petty cash controlling and administering, and controlling sales tax exemption certificates distribution. Internal reimbursement payments include receipts or both substantiate reimbursement requests. Petty cash controlling and administering includes petty expenses such as out-of-pocket office supplies or miscellaneous postage, company meeting lunch. Sales tax exemption certificates comprise AP department handling sales tax exemption certificates supply to managers to make sure qualifying business purchases excludes sales tax expense. Maintaining Records of Vendor Payments: Accounts Payable maintains information of vendor contact, terms of payment and information of Internal Revenue Service W-9 either manually or on a computer database. The AP department lets management know through reports on how much the business owes at present. Other Functions: The accounts payable department is also responsible to lessen costs by identifying cost structures and creating strategies to reduce the spending of business money. For example, minimising cost by making payment of the invoice within a discount period. The AP department also acts as a direct point of contact between an entity and the vendor. How to Calculate Accounts Payable in Financial Modelling Financial modelling enables calculating the average number of days a company takes to make bill payments. AP days can be calculated using the following formula: AP value can be calculated using the following formula: What is accounts payable turnover ratio? AP turnover ratio shows the capability of a firm to pay cash to its customer after credit purchases. It is counted as an essential ratio to analyse the cash management attribute of the firm and its relationship with vendors or suppliers. It is calculated by dividing purchases by average AP. Purchases by the company are calculated as the sum of the cost of sales and net inventory in a given period: Now let’s understand this with the help of an example. Let us suppose, Cost of sales of Company XYZ for the period was $60,000, and XYZ began with inventories worth $21000 and ended at $15000. AP at the beginning was $20000, and $15000 at the end. Now the purchases will be $66000 (60000+21000-15000). The average AP will be $17500. Therefore, the AP turnover ratio will be 3.77x. Dividing the number of weeks in a year by the AP turnover ratio will give the number of weeks the company takes on average to settle its payables. In this case, it will be around 13.8 weeks (52/3.77). What is the difference between Accounts Payable vs. Trade Payables? Though the phrases "accounts payable" and "trade payables" are used interchangeably, the phrases have slight differences. Trade payables is the cash that a company is obligated to pay to its vendors for goods and supplies which are part of the inventory. Accounts payable include all of the short-term debts or obligations of a company.
What is data warehousing? Data warehousing is defined as the method of gathering & handling data from different sources to get meaningful output and insights. Data warehousing is central to the BI system and is built for data analysis and reporting. Source: © nfo40555 | Megapixl.com In simple terms, a data warehouse is a large collection of data utilized by businesses to make investment decisions. What are the characteristics of data warehousing? Data warehouse has supported businesses in making informed decisions efficiently. Some of its key features are highlighted below: The data in a data warehouse is structured for easy access, and there is high-speed query performance. The end users generally look for high speed and faster response time – two features present in data warehousing. Large amount of historical data is used. Data warehouse provides a large amount of data for a particular query. The data load comprises various sources & transformations. What are the benefits of data warehousing? The Companies which used data warehousing for analytics and business intelligence found several advantages. Below are some of them: Better Data: When data sources are linked to a data warehouse, the Company can collect consistent and relevant data from the source. Also, the user would not have to worry about the consistency and accessibility of the data. Thus, it ensures data quality and integrity for sound decision making. Faster decisions: Through data warehousing, it is possible to make quicker decisions as the data available is in a consistent format. It offers analytical power and a comprehensive dataset to base decisions on tough truths. Thus, the people involved in decision making do not have to rely on hunches, incomplete data, and poor quality data. It also reduces the risk of delivering slow and inaccurate data. How does a data warehouse work? A data warehouse is like a central repository where the data comes from various sources. The data streams into the data warehouse from the transactional system and other relational databases. These data could either be structured, semi-structured or unstructured. These data get processed, altered, and consumed in a way that the end-user can gain access to the processed data in the data warehouse via business intelligence (BI) devices, SQL clients and spreadsheets. A data warehouse merges the data that comes from various sources into a complete database. The biggest advantage of this merged data is that the Company can analyze the data more holistically. It also makes the process of data mining smooth. Copyright © 2021 Kalkine Media Pty Ltd. Component of a data warehouse A data warehouse can be divided into four components. These are: Load Manager Load Manager, also known as the front component, does operations related to the mining and loading the data into a data warehouse. Load manager transforms the data for entering into Data warehouse. Warehouse Manager The warehouse manager manages the data within the data warehouse. It analyses data to confirm that the data in the data warehouse is steady. It also conducts operations such as the creation of indexes and views, generation of denormalization and aggregations, modifying and integrating the source data. Query Manager Query Manager is a backend component that does operations concerning the supervision of user queries. End-User access tools End-User access tools comprise data reporting, query tools, application development tools, EIS tools, data mining tools, and OLAP tools. Roles of Data Warehouse Tools and Utilities The tools and utilities in a data warehouse are used for: Data extraction: The data extraction process involves gathering data from heterogeneous sources. Data cleaning: Data cleaning consists of searching for any error in the data. Data transformation: Data transformation process involves changing the data into a data warehouse setup. Data loading: This process involves data sorting, recapping, consolidating, verifying integrity. Refreshing: This process requires revising data sources to the warehouse. Application of data warehouse Data warehouse plays a considerable role across multiple sectors. Some of the sectors it caters to are highlighted below. Aviation sector In the aviation sector, a data warehouse’s role can be seen in crew assignment, route profitability analysis, any promotional activity. Banking Industry In the banking sector, the focus is on risk management, policy reversal, customer data analysis, market trends, government rules and regulations and making financial decision. Through a data warehouse, banks can manage the resources available on the deck effectively. Banks also take the help of a data warehouse to do market research, analyze the products they offer, develop marketing programs. Retail industry Retailers act as an intermediary between the producers and the customers. Hence, these retailers use a data warehouse to maintain the records of both producers as well as the customer to maintain their existence in the market. Data warehouses help track inventory, advertisement promotions, tracking customer buying trends and many more. Healthcare industry In the healthcare industry, a data warehouse is used to predict the outcome of any test and taking relevant action accordingly. Data warehouses help them to generate patient treatment report, offer medical services, track the medicine inventory. Many patients visiting hospital have health insurance. Through a data warehouse, hospitals maintain the list of insurance providers. Investment and insurance sector In the insurance and investment sector, the role of data warehouse becomes important in tracking the data pattern, customer trend and market movement. Services sector In the services sector, a data warehouse is used for maintaining financial records, studying the revenue pattern, customer profiling, resource management and human resource management. Telecom The telecom sector uses a data warehouse in the promotion of its offerings, making sales decision, distribution decision, features to include in case they decide to launch a new product based on the customer requirement. Hospitality The hospitality sector involves hotel and restaurant services, car rental services etc. In this sector, the companies use a data warehouse to study the customer feedback on the various services offered and accordingly design and evaluate their advertising and promotion campaigns.
DWC measures average number of days taken by a company to transform working capital (current assets ? current liabilities) into sales revenue. It is a strong indicator of efficient management of working capital, which is calculated by dividing working capital to sales.
Earnings before interest and taxes (or EBIT) is also called the operating income that reflects the revenue generated by the business after considering all the operating expenses, i.e., revenue minus operating expense, and is a measure of operating earnings or profit before interest and taxes. Financial analysts generally use EBIT to analyse the performance of the core operations of a company without incorporating the costs of the capital structure and tax.