ASC 606: SaaS Revenue Recognition in Five Steps

It is an option that your accounting team can choose to expense entire commissions immediately. If you choose this option, you MUST be consistent and all contracts that are less than one year must be expensed immediately. This will often mean creating a clear and specific pricing structure and product list within the contract and clearly identifying what will be provided to the customer for each individual item. As you can tell, there are judgment calls that go into SaaS revenue recognition decisions.

The differences between the two standards are minor, but you can find the full list from FASB and IASB here. You can imagine how complicated this can get for mature SaaS businesses with different product lines, multiple incentive levers in the sales motion, and high transaction volumes. Certain kinds of change are welcome, like the opportunity to introduce new technologies to accounting workflows that have traditionally been tedious, manual, and time-consuming. But regulatory change brings short-term chaos to accounting processes (even if the changes are ultimately good in the long run).

Uncover What Drives Revenue

A simple example is if your business adds set-up fees for implementation services on top of the standard SaaS product pricing. Those are two distinct performance obligations that should be handled separately in the following steps. Most SaaS businesses charge a base fee to access and use their software, generally billed either on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. The total transaction price each customer pays may vary based on any number of factors your business chooses. SaaS companies recognize most of their revenue on a straight-line basis.

• ASC 606 outlines the principles for businesses that enter into any form of contract with customers to provide goods and services.
• For example, an online magazine selling a $144 annual subscription will recognize $12 as monthly revenue.
• The nature of the promise in this contract is to evaluate the data submitted by the customer.
• Subscription businesses always receive payments before they can earn them.
• The SaaS software provider would recognize revenue for these one-time fees when the services in a performance obligation are completed and received by the customer.

The new principle-based approach helps businesses determine revenue recognition. Setting out specific steps to follow before recognizing revenue ensures every employee understands how their decisions implicate revenue recognition. Therefore, operations, management, sales, and marketing will make specific judgments on their obligations, contracts, saas accounting and delivery before feeding them to accounting, so they know how to recognize revenue. The new 5-step revenue recognition process is efficient and accurate, makes your company run smoothly, and increases transparency across the board. After the initial sign-up process is complete, the service provider can recognize the $30 learner’s fee.

Revenue Recognition Software for Saas Businesses

Overstating or understating it leads to false financial figures and inaccurate financial predictions. If you want to see how HockeyStack can help you track key SaaS revenue recognition metrics, try out the live demo. HockeyStack unifies all data across departments, making sure that each team in your company has access to the same information. This breaking of departmental silos erases inconsistencies in data and promotes cross-functional collaboration thereby ensuring that all your revenue information is free of errors. It simplifies revenue intelligence for you while being entirely code-free.

• The overage fees can be recognized in full in July, as the responsibility tied to that payment was completed in July.
• Let’s say a customer has signed an annual contract of $12,000 at $1,000 per month.
• It’s imperative that your SaaS business understands how to recognize revenue to track profitability.
• Subscription revenue recognition is different from traditional revenue recognition methods.
• Deferred revenue is considered a liability; you’re yet to fulfill your obligation to provide a product or service that your customer has already paid for.
• The transaction processing platform can function without the training and data migration services.