 Hello and welcome to this session. This is Professor Farhat and this session we would look at few topics that are very important, extremely important for your understanding of governmental accounting. The first thing we're going to discuss is the basis of accounting. The second thing we're going to discuss is the measurement focus. Then what we're going to do, we're going to look at an actual example to show the difference under various basis of accounting. So let's take a look at basis of accounting and that should not be anything new to you. You should be familiar with the term full accrual. So what you did when you took financial accounting, when you took intermediate accounting, when you took your advanced accounting, you learned accounting and what you did, you learned the full accrual basis. And do you remember what the full accrual basis? Hopefully you do. It's when do we recognize revenues and expenses? The question is under the accounting basis is when do we recognize when revenue, when revenues and expenses are recorded? When are they recorded? Recorded or recognized? So this is what the basis of accounting answers. When? Well, before using the accrual basis, easy, not easy. What we learned is revenues are recognized when earned. This is the general simple rule and expenses are recognized when incurred. That's it. And hopefully you know this. If you don't know this, then you have some serious issues with your financial accounting. Okay, that's fine. So that's accrual. Then we also at some point, I'm pretty sure you covered the cash basis of accounting. Cash basis of accounting means what? It means your revenues and expenses are measured by cash receipts and cash disbursements. Simply put, revenues recognize when cash available. It's when you receive the cash. Expenses and to be more specific, we're going to call it expenditure and we'll talk about this shortly. Recognize when paid or expenses, but we don't call them expenses. We're going to call them expenditure are recognized when paid. Expenditure are recognized when paid. Okay, basically think of them expenses, but they're not really expenses and we'll discuss them shortly and we'll work an example. Now, this is the cash and this is the accrual. If you want to really think about it, cash and accrual, cash basis versus accrual basis, they're basically on the extreme of basis of accounting. So cash is strictly cash. The accrual is different. It's the opposite. Think of it as the other extreme of cash. Now in between cash and accrual, we could have many other basis of accounting. Tax basis of accounting, a modified accrual, which we're going to learn about shortly, modified cash, modified and accrual and modified cash. Sometimes they are interchangeable. Okay, so simply put, we have many types of other basis of accounting besides cash and accrual. Okay, but we're going to learn about now a term called modified accrual. Now, we're going to be using modified accrual when we deal with governmental funds. That's why we need to know about this governmental, that's why we need to know about this modified accrual. Before we proceed, I would like to invite you to visit farhatlectures.com. Farhat accounting lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions, as well as exercises. Go ahead, start your free trial today, no obligation, no credit card required. So what is modified accrual? What is that modified accrual? Again, if you want to call it modified cash, it can be acceptable. We'll call it modified accrual. So it's someplace in between cash and accrual. When do we recognize revenue under modified accrual? Well, revenues are recognized when measurable and available to finance expenditure of the current period. Now, I am not going to be discussing specific revenues in this session. The reason is we're going to cover this later. We're going to cover later about government revenue. How do they recognize different types of revenues? We're going to have many types of revenues, but the general idea for modified accrual, the general rule is revenues are measurable. You can measure it. You could put a dollar amount on it and it's available. And we're going to see later that it's available in the near future. Available means you have access to it in the very near future and we'll define what's available to. It could be 90 days. It's available to you available to you in 90 days. So it's measurable. You know how much it is and it's available or near close to availability. To do what? To finance expenditure. What are expenditure? Expenditure or cost are the reduction of net assets. So you have to use your asset to pay for cost to reduce your liabilities. That's what expenditure are. Once again, revenues specifically to be discussed later. Okay. So when we notice we use the term expenditure. So when we talked about full accrual, we did not say anything about the word expenditure. Notice the word expenditure appeared under the cash basis and the modified accrual. The word expenditure, notice here full accrual. There's no expenditure. There's no expenditure. Okay. So when do we use the term expenditure? We use the term expenditure under cash basis of accounting and under modified accrual. And what is expenditure? In a sense, it's an expense, but it doesn't have to be an expense. That's what I'm trying to tell you. It's not an expense. It is a decrease in a financial resource, usually cash, to settle a liability with current financial resources. So you have basically an obligation. What you do is you have an obligation to pay for something and usually pay it with cash, either to pay for something or to settle a liability. You owe something. So this is what expenditure are. This is what expenditure are. Okay. So that's what expenditure. But let's go ahead and look at, I want to kind of compare and contrast the three method because if we can compare and contrast the three method, then it will be easier for us to see things. So we have, once again, we have the cash basis. We have the modified accrual and we have the full accrual basis. So those are the three, the full accrual basis. Okay. And those are, what do we call them? Those are called accounting basis, accounting basis. Okay. Remember, what do they, what do they, what do they concern about? When do we recognize revenue and when do we recognize expenditure? Okay. So we're going to come back to this slide in a moment, to this screen. The next thing we're going to look at is something called the measurement focus. Now we talked about a basis of accounting. Now we're going to talk about measurement focus. What does measurement, what is, what are we measuring? What is the measurement focus? The measurement focus is what, let me change this, what assets or which, not what, what, which assets and liabilities are we recognizing? Recognizing means what? Means recording. What assets and liabilities are we recognizing? What assets and liability? So what is the focus of the entity? What is the focus of the entity? And remember, we talked about entity. Entities could be a fund. So what's the focus of the fund? What is the focus of the fund? So we're going to have to learn about this new term, very important. It's called the economic resources, the economic resource measurement focus. What does this economic resource measurement focus? Well, I'm going to add few words to it. It focuses, it focus, what does it focus on? It focus on all, so write this down. This is important for your understanding of how we do governmental accounting. All assets, double underline all, all liabilities. So what we're doing is when we measure the activities of the entity, if we are using the economic resource focus, the economic resource focus, the economic resource measurement focus, we are focusing on all assets and all liabilities. In other words, we're going to be recording our long-term assets such as building equipment, so on and so forth. We're going to be recording our long-term liabilities. And obviously, when we report income, financial position, which is a balance sheet and cash flow, we're going to take into account all of the assets, all of the liabilities, including long-term. Okay? And the focus is to measure operation, what we call operational accountability. How well we are operating the business overall, including long-term assets, long-term liabilities? Well, here's a surprise for you. When do we measure all assets and all liabilities under which accounting basis? Hopefully, we all know this. This is basically, we use this for accrual. When we do accrual accounting, and hopefully you know this, even though maybe you were never told that this is an economic resource focus, economic resource focus means you are, when you're reporting, you're reporting on all your assets on all your liabilities. Now, we have another focus. We have another focus that's called current financial resource management focus. And maybe hopefully, you know, from the term current, what does current mean? It means current assets and current liabilities. Current financial resources focus on two things. It focuses only on your current assets, because the focus is current. It focuses on your current assets and current liabilities. So simply put, we ignore, we don't take into account when we prepare our financial statements, long-term assets, long-term liabilities. Okay? So it reports on the inflow and outflow of current financial resources. What are current financial resources? Cash or other items expected to be converted to cash in the current period. So the current financial resource focus only focuses on the current assets and current liabilities. And the reason we say is to measure the physical accountability. What is physical accountability? It's the legal and budget needs of the government. So who uses current financial resource measurement focus? We're going to see government funds, governmental funds. Governmental funds, they use the current financial measurement focus. And let's talk about this for a moment. Let's talk about this for a moment. If we think about a government, if we think about a government, what do government own or control? What do government own and control? Well, they own the streets, the roads, the bridges, right? Those are all, you would say, those are long-term assets, right? Now, if we want to hold the government accountable, if you want, really, if you want to hold the government accountable, what did we talk about in the prior session? What we said, what's important in the government is something called a budget. A budget means what, how are we planning to raise money? Okay, how are we planning to bring the money? And how are we planning to spend the money? So that's what the budget focuses, because the government has a physical accountability. Accountability, that's physical means it has to meet a legal and a budget need. There's a budget that you have to follow. Then what we do, we don't care about the long-term assets that doesn't tell us anything about where the money's coming and where the money being spent. So the way the government measure its activities, it measures its activity using the current financial resources. So they only record current assets and current liabilities. And hopefully, you remember when I was going over the governmental fund in the prior session, I told you, do you see that you notice that there are no long-term assets and no long-term liabilities? Now, you might be asking, what do they do with long-term assets and long-term liabilities? We're going to see later. They put them on a separate list and we'll discuss those later on. Okay, but that's the point of current financial resource measurement focus. So we have economic resource focus, which is it encompass everything, long-term as well as short-term. But the current financial resource focus only focuses on the current assets and current liability. So let's go back to that, to that basis of accounting that I talked about earlier. And let's look at, this is what I did earlier. I said, here are the three basis of accounting, cash, modified accrual and full accrual. Let's look at the measurement basis. Measurement basis. Well, let's talk about it. If we're using cash basis, well, the only thing that we worry about, if we're reporting everything on cash basis, the only thing we worry about is cash. So we only record transaction, if cash is involved, cash basis, that we pay cash, record the transaction, that we receive cash, record the transaction. And the absence of cash, there is no, really no transaction. Cruel. It focuses, remember, what does modified accrual focuses on? Modified accrual, let's go back. And we said modified accrual focuses on recognize revenues when measurable and expenditure that are incurred. So the modified accrual only focus on short term assets, short term liabilities. So when we are using modified accrual, we don't have no long term assets, no long term liabilities. So we don't record long term assets and long term liabilities. We only record short term assets and short term liabilities. When it comes to full accrual, full accrual, what do we measure? We measure all assets and all liabilities. Now, we're going to be focusing on two of them. We're going to be focusing on the full accrual and we're going to be focusing on the modified accrual basis. Remember, full accrual is basically the system that we know. The modified accrual is the new basis of accounting. So to illustrate the point between the three methods, the best way to do is to actually work an example because if you work an example, you might see how we do things. Now, before we work an example, just real quick, I'm going to show you things that we haven't covered yet, but I just want to point this out to you. Some stuff we covered, some we haven't yet. Governmental fund statement. The measurement focus is current financial resources. Well, the basis of accounting modified accrual. Current financial resources means we only measure current assets and current liabilities. And obviously, the third inflow and the third outflow, which is, we said, it's part of those assets and liabilities. However, eventually, in the future, we're going to learn about government-wide statements. They use accrual. We're going to learn about proprietary fund statement, which is also part of the government, but they're called proprietary fund statements, which we'll cover next. It's going to use accrual. That's the economic resource focus. We're going to look at fiduciary fund statements. They're going to be the measurement focus is economic resources, and the basis of accounting is accrual. So simply put, it's easy to just remember that if you are doing accounting for governmental funds, governmental funds, and remember the governmental funds, if you don't remember, I'm just going to list them real quick for you. Remember, we have kind of two groups. One is called the general fund, and the government will have only one general fund, and they will have many others, like debt service fund, capital project fund, and you could have many of those, et cetera. So those are the funds that uses the modified accrual that focuses on current financial resources. All right, this is why we are doing this. Now, the best way to do this is to actually work an example to show you the different method, show you the different method. So let's take a look at this example. A newly established, rather than not for profit, I'm just going to say government, it doesn't matter. They're basically the same. A government, a newly established government engage in the following transaction. So let's start. A donor pledged $1 million, given the government illegally enforceable 90-day note for the full amount. So here's what happened here. This is a transaction. Somebody pledged $1 million for the government. Then the donor paid $300,000 of the amount pledged. The organization purchased a building for $600,000, paying $120 in cash, and given 30-year mortgage note for the balance. The building has a 30-year useful life when appropriate. The organization charges a full depreciation in the period of acquisition. That's fine. It hires an employee by the end of the period. They have earned $4,000 in wages, but not yet paid. So we have four transactions. And here's what we're going to do. We're going to prepare the journal entries. So the organization accounts for its activities in a single fund. So all of this is going to be in one fund. We're going to prepare the journal entries to record the transaction, making the following alternative assumption to the organization measurement focus. Let's assume the organization has a cash focus only. We're going to prepare the transaction under the cash basis, basically cash. This is cash basis, cash only. Cash plus other current resources. Cash plus other current resources is the modified basis, right? Because it's cash plus current assets and current liabilities. And we're going to prepare those transactions using all economic resources, which is, in other words, journalize them using full approval. Now, this is a good exercise to show you the difference of how we record transactions that are a little bit different, a little bit unusual, because you should only know about full approval. And maybe you know a little bit about the cash basis, but you never did really cash basis. So let's go ahead and start to journalize those transactions, starting with the cash basis. Cash basis. Let's look at the first transaction and analyze the first transaction. A donor pledged $1 million, given the organization illegally enforceable 90-day note for the full amount. So this is transaction one. And my question to you is, what do you do? What do you record here? And the answer is, if I'm using the cash basis, there is no entry. Why there is no entry? Because we did not receive any cash. All what the donor said, I'm pledging to give you a million dollars. That's all. Well, that's not cash. Good. Transaction two. The donor paid $300,000 of the amount pledged. Now, the donor gave money. Well, guess what? If the donor gave money, easy, we're going to debit cash under the cash basis for $300,000. And we're going to credit. You can call it anything you want to. You can call it contribution revenue. You can call it pledge revenue, but it's revenue. So I'm going to call it either contribution slash, if it's a non-profit, you call it pledge revenue. But if it's a government, usually it's a contribution revenue, $300,000. So notice under the cash basis, we debit the cash credited revenue for the revenue. Easy. Three, the organization purchased the building for $600,000, paying $120,000 in cash, and given 30-day mortgage note for the balance. The building has a 30-year useful life on appropriate. The organization charges a full year of depreciation in the period of acquisition. All right. Now, what did we do? We acquired a building. All right. How do we record this transaction under the cash basis? Well, again, we bought a building. The building cost $600,000. We only paid $120,000. Well, that's easy. Let's credit $120,000. The question is, what do you debit and for how much? Well, remember, the cash basis of accounting, let's go back and look at the cash basis of accounting. Under the cash basis of accounting, I just told you under the cash basis, you only have cash. You could only have cash. So you don't have long-term assets. The focus is only on cash. So you don't have long-term assets. So you cannot debit the building. So simply put, you cannot debit a building here. You can just say, well, I bought an asset. Well, if you debit the building, well, how much are you going to debit the building for? The building is for $600,000. Well, you don't debit the building. So you don't debit an asset. What's going to happen, because this building is a long-term asset and cash basis don't carry long-term assets. They only have cash. So what we do is kind of, we consider it as if it's an expenditure. And what's an expenditure? It's a decrease in net asset. It's a decrease in net asset. So what we're going to do, we're going to debit building expenditure, $120,000. So that's the debit. So the debit is building expenditure. And I double underline expenditure. It's not a building expense because under the cash basis, we don't have expense. We have expenditure, because the cruel we have expenses. So we debit the building expenditure. Why? Because under the cash basis, when you prepare your income statement, it's what you paid. It's considered an outflow of cash. And what you receive, it's an inflow of cash. For example, if we stop right here and they need to prepare their income statement or unquote income statement, well, it's $300,000 minus $120,000. We have the revenue from the pledge minus the expenditure. So we'd say, well, the profit is $180,000 as far as the income statement is concerned. So notice the cash basis, what's going to happen at the end of the year, you close all the account, you close all the account, and what's left is cash. So this is what you do. You debit something called building expenditure. So you don't have long term assets. Transaction four, it hired an employee by the end of the period. They had earned $4,000 in wages, but not yet paid. Well, not yet paid means what? If they're not paid, there's no cash transaction, there's no entry. That's it. There's no entry, and that's the end of it. Now, if I ask you to calculate what's the profit for this, what's the profit for this business? Well, the profit you would say is, as I said, $300,000 cash in minus $120,000 cash out, that's $180,000. So that's an increase in the end quote equity. And what's the cash? Well, the cash, we received the cash. What's the cash balance? We received $300,000. We paid out $120,000. The cash balance is $180,000. So on the balance sheet, so this is basically the income statement. And on the balance sheet, all what you have is cash, $180,000 assets. And on the liabilities, you don't have liabilities. You don't record the long term liabilities because it's a note. You don't record the liabilities, actually. And what you have is the fund balance, like the equity of $180, because basically you make an earning. Therefore, it goes under the fund balance into the assets equal liabilities plus fund balance. So your fund balance is $180. So your cash is $180, your fund balance is $180. That's your balance sheet. Okay. Now, we're going to prepare the same transaction using the modified accrual accounting, the modified accrual. Now, we're going to use, we're going to record the transaction that deals with cash plus current financial resources. And current financial resources are current assets, current liabilities. So let's go ahead and start to process the transaction. Now, we're going to be using the modified basis of accounting, modified basis. Let's start with the first transaction. The modified basis focuses, it has cash, but it has also current financial resources. A donor pledged $1 million given the organization a legally enforceable 90-day note for the full amount. Well, basically, what does that mean? What does that mean when someone promises to pay you and now they have a legal obligation to pay you? Because in this situation, they make a pledge. Okay. Well, if someone makes a pledge and it's enforceable, now you have a receivable. Is a receivable a current asset? And hopefully, you know, receivable are current assets. And what you have now is a notes or pledge, notes or pledge receivable for how much? For a million dollars. So that's your debit. You debit an asset called note or pledge receivable. And this is a current asset. How did I know it's a current asset? Because it's in 90 days, they're going to have to pay. So it's a current asset. So that's what I would debit. What do I credit? Well, I would credit, I'm going to call it contribution revenue, some sort of a revenue account, a million dollar. That's transaction one. Notice under the cash basis, there was no transaction. Under the accrual basis, we have a receivable. Therefore, we debit the receivable we credit the revenue. Transaction two, the donor paid $300,000 of the amount pledged. Well, that's easy. We'll start with cash. We debit cash, $300,000. What do we credit? Well, we're going to credit. Now we're receiving the money from that pledge. Basically, we're going to credit notes or whatever we did, whatever we debited, we're going to credit notes, pledge, receivable. So whatever you debit, you're going to credit. I'd said you could be notes receivable, could be pledge receivable, whatever you want to call it, $300,000. So under the modified accrual, you are taken into account current assets and current liabilities. Let's go to transaction three. Transaction three, we purchased the building for $600,000. We pay 120 cash and the remainder, it's a long term liability. It's a 30-year mortgage. What do we record under this transaction? Well, which method are we using? We're using the modified accrual basis, the modified accrual basis. And under the modified accrual basis, we only record cash and current assets and current liabilities. So did we pay cash? Absolutely. So we have to record cash, $120,000. What did we buy? We buy a building. Can we debit the building? And the answer is no. Why not? Because we are using modified accrual basis. What does that mean? Under modified accrual basis, we don't have no long-term assets, no long-term liabilities. So how are we going to record this? Well, we paid cash. It's an expenditure. We paid cash. It's an expenditure. So what's going to happen? We're going to call it, just like we called it under the cash basis, building expenditure, not a building expense, building expenditure, $120,000. So this is a building expenditure. What are we going to do with the liability? Are we going to just ignore it? No, we're going to take care of it someplace else later on. But this is how we record the transaction. So similar or the same as, if you notice, the same as the cash basis, same as the cash basis. Okay. Transaction four. Hired an employee and by the end of the period, the employee earned $4,000 in wages, but not yet paid. So the employee earned but not yet paid. Let's see. Under the cash basis, we didn't do anything. Under the accrual basis, do you think we have to do something? And the answer is yes. Why? Because when are we going to pay this employee? We're going to pay this employee in the near future, maybe a week or two. This is how long an employee would wait for wages that they have earned. So what's going to happen now? We're going to have wages or salaries, expenditure, not expenses. We don't have expenses under the accrual basis for $4,000. And we're going to credit wages, payable $4,000 wages, payable as a current liability. Can we record current liabilities? And the answer, of course, we can. This is the modified accrual. The modified accrual focuses on cash and current resources, current assets and current liabilities. Excellent. So this is how we prepare those transactions under the accrual basis. Now, if you want to complete an income statement for this, well, this is the revenue. We have $1 million in revenues. We have expenditure of $120,000, $4,000 in expenditure. You could calculate the revenue. Then the assets that we have, we had, we started with the receivable of a million. It was reduced by $300,000. Then we had a cash. We started with $300,000. We paid $120,000. Then we have another liability. So if you want to prepare, well, let's, so what would go on the income statement? What would go on the income statement is the million dollar pledge revenue. So on the income statement, this will go on the income statement. Again, if you're going to see later, it's not called specifically income statement. But I'm going to call it your income statement because we're just starting this. So we're going to call it the income statement. What else would go? The expense, the building expenditure minus $120,000 minus $4,000. And this will be basically what we called in a cruel net income. On the balance sheet, you're going to have the assets. The assets will consist of the notes receivable. So we're going to have a notes receivable. We still have a balance of $700,000. We're going to have cash. So notes receivable, cash. Cash is $300,000 minus $120,000. Cash will be $180,000. We're going to have a liability of $4,000. We're going to have a liability of $4,000. And since we don't have any fund balance yet, whatever this number is, $1 million. Let's see. Let's do it real quick since we already started this process. So we'll take $1 million in revenue minus $120,000 minus $4,000. That's going to give us $876,000. And this will be our fund balance, $876,000. Make sure now they add up $876,000 plus $4,000. That's $880,000. This is assets. This is liabilities and fund balance. And assets, we have $180,000 plus $700,000. Total assets of $880,000. And notice they balance. They balance. So this is demodified. I just want to show you that it does work just like the accounting system that you learned earlier. Now, the third method we're going to use is it says using all economic resources. All economic resources means what? It means record everything. Long-term assets, long-term liabilities, everything. So starting with a donor pledge $1 million given the organization illegally enforceable 90-day contract. What entry do we make? This is a cruel now. This is a cruel basis of accounting, a cruel basis. We debit notes, receivable, credit, contribution, revenue. Some sort of a receivable, some sort of a revenue for a million dollars. Just what we did in modified accrual. This is the same as the modified accrual. Because under the modified accrual, we do account for short-term asset, which are notes receivable that are being paid within the next 90 days. Transaction to the donor paid $300,000 just like modified accrual. We're going to debit cash for $300,000. We're going to credit notes receivable for $300,000. Transaction three, we bought a building for $600,000. We paid 120 cash. The remainder was a notes payable. Well, here we're going to debit a building. Why we're going to debit the building? Because we're using the accrual basis. We're going to debit the building, which is a long-term asset, LT asset. We're going to debit the building for $600,000. We're going to credit cash $120,000. We're going to credit notes payable, which is a liability $480,000. We just recorded the building. Then transaction four, the employee earned $4,000 that hasn't been paid. This is a wage expense. Why did we call it expense? Because we are using accrual. Accrual accounting, use the term expense. Expenditure basically encompass both payment of liabilities and payment of expenses, $4,000. What we do is we credit wages payable $4,000. Now, I'm not going to prepare the income statement and the balance sheet for accrual. Hopefully, you know how to do this. But this is the difference between where I just showed you. This example shows you the difference between how to account for transaction under the cash basis, modified basis, and full accrual. Are we going to be working more exercises like this? Absolutely. The reason this exercise is only for illustration purposes to give you a feeling of what we just learned about.