Asset account help

[browell]

Good evening,

Background: I took over as treasuer of a small non-profit club midway through 2013. We use quicken to mange our accounts. Keeping the club's books is pretty staightforward for anyone who manages thier home finances but it has now become a little tricky.

At the club's latest board meeting, we reviewed the income for December 2013. In December 2013, the club collected $2000 in registration fees for an event taking place in June 2014.

The club's VP is an accountant and he suggested I create an asset account for this income and we quickly moved on to another subject.

My issues are 1) I don't know what an asset account is and 2) I don;t understand why the VP suggested I set one up 3) the term modified accrue basis cam up and I don't know what that means.

Could anyone help me out with this?

Thank you,

-Ben

 

[Counterofbeans]

(1) An asset account is simply a general ledger account used to record assets of the company. Cash would be an asset, where you'd want to record the receipt of the $2,000 into.

(2) Your VP isn't correct unless he meant setting up a cash account, but that would seem very strange.

(3) Modified accrual accounting combines accrual-basis accounting with cash-basis accounting. Pursuant to this methodology, you would recognize revenues when they become available and measurable and, with a few exceptions, recognize expenditures when liabilities are incurred.

This is likely why December income shows $2,000 related to the registration fees, instead, if the accounting was full accrual, then the $2,000 would be recorded as a liability until June 2014.

Hope that helps