Revenue Management: #1 What does it mean to "recognize" revenue?

Earning revenue isn't just about collecting cash from your customers. It's about recording the income correctly and consistently. Revenue recognition is the process of deciding when and how to record revenue in financial statements so that they reflect the true value after the goods or services are delivered.

​
Today's business models are more dynamic than ever. Subscriptions, long-term projects, bundled products, and usage-based pricing make it challenging to determine when a sale is truly earned.

​
We will be going through a series of posts on Revenue Recognition and how it works with different industries, starting with,

➤ What is revenue recognition?
➤ What are the principles behind the standards?

What is Revenue Recognition?

Revenue Recognition is an accounting principle that defines when and how businesses can record revenue in their books. It ensures revenue is reported only when the company has delivered the promised goods or service, not simply when a payment is received.

For instance, if a customer pays upfront for 12 months of service, the business cannot recognize all of that money immediately. It must recognize it gradually over the period the service is delivered.

To address these challenges, Accounting standards like IFRS 15 and ASC 606 were introduced.

​

​What Do IFRS 15 & ASC 606 Say?

Both IFRS 15 & ASC 606 are closely aligned. They denote that companies must recognize revenue when they satisfy their performance obligation, that is, when they deliver the promised goods or services fully to the customer.

The core principle is:

"Recognize revenue to depict the transfer of promised goods or services to the customer in an amount that reflects the consideration to which the entity expects to be entitled."

To make this consistent across industries, these standards use a five-step model.

​
This model helps businesses recognize revenue accurately by following a structured process. Each step ensures that income is recorded only when a company truly earns it by delivering the promise.

Steps	Description	Example
Step 1: Identify the Contract with a Customer	Confirm there is a legal, enforceable agreement with clear payment terms and obligations.	A software company signs a 12-month service contract with a client with proper terms and a clear payment schedule.
Step 2: Identify the Performance Obligations	Break the contract into separate performance obligations that provide unique values.	Contract includes access to software, onboarding support, and monthly training. These are distinct services and are treated separately.
Step 3: Determine the Transaction Price	Calculate the total expected payment, including any discount, bonus, or other variables.	The total contract worth is $12,000, but the customer gets a discount of $1000 for an annual payment upfront. The transaction price becomes $11,000 in this case.
Step 4: Allocate the Transaction Price to the Obligation	Distribute the transaction pricing across the performance obligation based on their standalone selling prices.	If software is usually sold for $9,000, support for $1500 and training for $1500, the $11,000 will be proportionally allocated to each of these.
Step 5: Recognize Revenue When (or As) Obligations Are Satisfied	Revenue is recorded either over time or at a point when the customer gains complete control of the product or service.	In case of software licensing and implementation, the revenue is recognized monthly over 12 months, but the onboarding is recognized as and when it's delivered.

 

This single contract shows how IFRS 15/ASC 606 helps businesses handle complexity like discounts, variable consideration, multiple deliverables and other aspects in recognizing revenue.

Ultimately, these standards require companies to:

• Recognize revenue only when the performance obligation is met.
  
• While selling services and goods together, consider them as individual deliverables.
• Allocate the total contract value fairly across all deliverables.
• Adjust discounts, bonuses, and other variable pricing.
• Provide an audit-ready document for how and when revenue is recognized.

The bottom line of revenue recognition is straightforward. But while computing, it doesn't look the same when you are dealing with different billing models and while handling hundreds of contracts/transactions.

In the next post, we'll look at where computing revenue recognition gets tricky with some real-time business scenarios. 

• Topic Participants

• Hari Hara Sudhan. S

  

• Sticky Posts

• Community Learning Series | Digest #5 — September 2020

  Dear customers, We're happy to bring you the September edition of our #CommunityDigest! Keep track of your subscription KPIs right from your smartphone: Last month, we enhanced our Android mobile app to help our customers get daily updates on their business health. We got to know from a lot of customers that this has made their job much more easier because they no longer have to keep a reminder to manually check on the previous day's revenue or activations. If you have not downloaded it yet, here's

• Community Learning Series | Digest #4 - August 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. I'm happy to bring you the fourth edition of our #CommunityDigest with some brand-new updates from us. 1. Daily Business Updates (for Android users) The Zoho Subscriptions Android app has got a cool new update: You can now get a push notification to your smartphone that lets you know how many activations and cancellations have taken place, and what's the net revenue for the previous day. The best part is, you can tell the app when exactly you

• Community Learning Series | Digest #3 - July 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you're staying safe and healthy. We're glad to bring you the July edition of our #CommunityDigest. New community members can view our previous newsletters here. This time, we have two major updates and three interesting topics for you: 1. Zoho Subscriptions Developer Community Since the inception of Zoho Subscriptions, our team believed that the recurring billing platform we provide should be able to offer an extensive API library that empowers businesses to automate most

• Introducing: Community Learning Series | Digest #1 - May 2020

  Dear customers, We hope you are staying safe and healthy. Helping businesses manage their customer subscriptions more efficiently has always been, and always will be, our goal at Zoho Subscriptions. We strongly believe this is possible if we grow together as a community and share what we know with each other. To nurture this shared learning experience, here is our brand-new Community Learning Series! ​ Welcome to the first edition of our digest! Each edition of our community digest includes guides

• Recent Topics

• Brand Studio Projects in Analytics

  Hi All, Currently pulling my hair out over trying to link together some social media posts for a reporting dashboard in Analytics, so I thought I'd see if anyone on here had a solution. Our Marketing Team created a LinkedIn campaign in Zoho Brand Studio,

• Manage Testing Process in Zoho Sprints

  Agile framework supports a robust quality assurance system that incorporates continuous testing throughout the development lifecycle of the product. The agile testing team focuses on planning the testing around the development, identifying defects early

• Announcing the Zohotshots of the ZDC Hackathon 2025

  Hey everyone, The wait is finally over! After weeks of building, experimenting, and pushing creative boundaries, we’re excited to announce the winners of the second edition of the ZDC Hackathon. This edition brought together an incredible community of

• ZOHO CRM Button Integration

  Hi Team, I’m currently working with Zoho CRM along with a custom application where I fetch deal details from the CRM and use them based on my requirements for each deal. Now, I want to enhance this setup. I plan to create a button on the Deal Detail page

• Major journey crash and not loading. Zoho Marketing Automation

  Hi all. Last night (19MAR, 2026) Marketing Automation for a specific journey completely crashed, and since the crash the specific journey has failed to load at all (blank journey canvas, no journey appears, no menu accessible) but other separate journey's

• Candidate Assessments, no workflows.

  I have an issue where I would like to trigger a workflow based on a candidate assessment being completed. Sometimes a returning candidate will complete a second assessment, on completion the status of the candidate will be updated to "Unqualified" if

• Mail Merge in Zoho Desk

  Hello Team, Do we have an option of mail merge within Zoho Desk like we have in Zoho CRM? We have a requirement to generate some pdf file in the form of mail merge doc from the ticket.

• Workdrive backup and default storage selection

  Hi community, I have been informed by Zoho that workdrive will be the default storage mechanism for crm and projects. These 2 Apps seem to have different design on how they interact with workdrive for storage. 1. Crm: seems to have files saves at the

• Zoho vault filling in a form it's not supposed to fill in

  Hey there, I have a problem with ZOHO Vault autofill. In a software package, we have these options: For some reason zoho vault always replaces what's in the top option and fills a 2fa password in there, and then saves that value.. Meaning whatever was

• Zoho Booking Integration with Desk

  Just wanting to share something in case it helps someone else who may run into a similar use case as we did. Issue: Currently, the Zoho Booking integration with desk will drop a comment into the ticket when a customer books a time, however it won't change

• Let us view and export the full price books data from CRM

  I quote out of CRM, some of my clients have specialised pricing for specific products - therefore we use Price Books to manage these special prices. I can only see the breakdown of the products listed in the price book and the specialised pricing for

• Syncing calendar with Google Calendar doesn't work when events are sent to auto repeat

  Hi... The ZOHO CRM -- GOOGLE CALENDAR sync is broken. If I create a single event on either side, sync works, but if I create an event with auto repeat on either side it doesn't work. Furthermore, events created before the sync don't show up in the calendar.

• Organization wide Account and Contacts Visibility/Sharing Capabilities?

  Has anyone figured out a way to make visibility or sharing of Accounts and Contacts to be available across the entire organization without having to have every individual user edit their Sharing permissions? For our sales folks they need to be able to

• Notification of Interaction Assignment

  If a user is assigned an interaction, they should be notified via email. These are almost useless because if I assign an interaction for someone to respond to, they dont know that I assigned it to them without me telling them or them logging in and discovering

• Countries List Global Set- Complete with Phone Country Code and Continent.

  Dear Zoho Team I saw your recent addition to the Global Sets regarding the Countries list and states. While working on it, why didn't you also add things like Continent and Phone Country Code? Also, some ISO codes from some Countries/regions are mis

• Custom Display Field for Lookup Dropdowns in Zoho CRM

  Could Zoho CRM support changing the display field in lookup dropdowns, like Zoho Creator does? This would make it much easier to select the right record by showing a more useful field instead of only the default one. It would improve speed, clarity, and

• Message as bot

  I would like to be able to send a Cliq message truly as a bot. the current implementation of this function, while it sends the message as a bot it sends that message inside a chat from the user how authenticated the flow cliq connection instead of directly

• Books <-> CRM synchronisation with custom Fields

  Hello, We are synchronising Books Customers with CRM Accounts. In CRM Accounts I set up last year a "segments" multiselect field shown below In Books, I set up a custom multi-select field with the same value as in the CRM And set up the synchronisation inside Books. Want to synchronise the Books Segments with the CRM Segments, but the later doesn't exist, and another non-existing is there ?! First, I don't understand where the field Segmentation is coming from. Second, I set CRM Segmentation to sync

• Trouble with using Apostrophe in Name of Customers and Vendors

  We have had an ongoing issue with how the system recognizes an apostrophe in the name of customers and vendors. The search will not return any results for a name that includes the mark; ie one of our vendors names is "L'Heritage" and when entering the

• Recording overpayment?

  So a customer just overpaid me and how do I record this? I can't enter an amount that is higher than the invoice amount. Eg. Invoice is $195 and he sent $200. He's a reccuring customer so is there a way to record so that he has a $5 advance for future invoice?

• Introducing the New Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin

  We are thrilled to announce the new Zoho Assist Quick Support Plugin, the upgraded and enhanced version of the Zoho Assist Customer Plugin. This new plugin allows organizations and IT administrators to deploy it directly onto their customers’ devices,

• Automate your signing workflows with Zoho Sign + n8n

  Hello! We're excited to announce that Zoho Sign is now available as a community node on n8n, a popular open-source workflow automation platform used by tens of thousands of teams worldwide. n8n lets you connect apps, APIs, and services through a visual

• Ask the Experts 27: Onboarding and managing support reps

  Hello everyone, We are back with our Ask the Experts (ATE) series for 2026. This year, we bring experts to help you address customer support challenges using Zoho Desk. For our first ATE, we are getting into the human side of customer support. "Every

• Retainer invoice in Zoho Finance modlue

  Hello, Is there a way of creating retainer invoices in the Zoho Finance module? If not can I request this is considered for future updates please.

• Spotlight #27: Embed visual collaboration Spaces in your presentations using the Vani add-on

  Hello everyone! This month’s spotlight feature is the Vani add-on for Zoho Show. Every time you pause your presentation to open another tab or pull up supporting material, you lose a bit of momentum. At Zoho Show, we design features that keep everything

• CRM

  Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Our company is not moving out of using Gmail's web app. It just has more features and is a better email program than Zoho Mail. Gmail has an extension (Zoho CRM for Gmail) that we're using but we've found some serious

• Good news! Calendar in Zoho CRM gets a face lift

  Dear Customers, We are delighted to unveil the revamped calendar UI in Zoho CRM. With a complete visual overhaul aligned with CRM for Everyone, the calendar now offers a more intuitive and flexible scheduling experience. What’s new? Distinguish activities

• Global Search / Command Palette in Live App

  Zoho Creator applications can contain many forms, reports, pages, and dashboards. While navigation inside the app is smooth, users still need to move through multiple menus or screens to find specific records or open particular modules. Currently, in

• New 2026 Application Themes

  Love the new themes - shame you can't get a little more granular with the colours, ie 3 different colours so one for the dropdown menu background. Also, I did have our logo above the application name but it appears you can't change logo placement position

• Smarter appointment allocation with round-robin distribution

  Greetings from the Zoho Bookings team! We’re excited to introduce the Appointment Distribution feature, a new way to decide how appointments are assigned among users. By default, appointments are distributed evenly across all event types, but this enhancement

• A2P 10DLC Opt-in Rejection Issue with Zoho Creator Public Form

  Hi everyone, I’m working on an A2P 10DLC SMS campaign and running into repeated rejections due to opt-in issues. I’m using Zoho Creator for the registration flow. The form is public (no login required). Users enter their phone number and there is an unchecked

• Make Quick Edits to Images Before Attaching

  Hello everyone, We have enhanced how attachments are handled in tickets to help agents preview and share files more efficiently in Zoho Desk. Agents can preview image attachments before adding them to tickets and edit them using attachment annotator.

• 3/18 オンライン勉強会のお知らせ Zoho ワークアウト （無料）

  ユーザーの皆さま、こんにちは。コミュニティチームの中野です。 3月開催のZoho ワークアウトの開催が決定しましたのでご案内します。 今回はZoomにて、オンライン開催します。 ▶︎参加登録はこちら（無料） https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/BoNTN7zYR8OvOPGShqBY0A ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Zoho ワークアウトとは？ Zoho ユーザー同士で交流しながら、サービスに関する疑問や不明点の解消を目指すイベントです。

• Extend color coding to custom picklist fields

  Objectively, Projects has the best UI of any Zoho app — clean, intuitive, and never feels bloated. Big props to whoever owns the design. Feature request: color coding for custom picklist field values in field customization. You've already done it in two

• New in Office Integrator: In-sheet text translation

  Hi users, We're pleased to introduce translation capability in the spreadsheet editor in Zoho Office Integrator. This allows you to translate the text in your spreadsheet's cells into 70+ languages from within your web app. Office Integrator's spreadsheet

• Streamline email communication with Out of Office configuration

  Managing user communication effectively is the key to ensuring timely responses and consistent messaging. However, when users are unavailable, the absence of an Out of Office response can lead to delays and missed expectations. Managing these settings

• Changing settings for auto logoff

  I've noticed that when I haven't used Cliq for a while, I have to re-enter my password. That is really clumsy, especially if you have a complicated password. Because it won't be filled in automatically. Is there a way to change that behaviour? We are

• A few Issues when using "Pay Bill via Check"

  We have quite a bit of issues with how paying for Bills via Check works. Would love some feedback from the Zoho team in case we are doing something incorrectly. 1. When we go from a vendor and select "Pay Bill via Check" option, we see ALL the outstanding

• Prevent tracking users from specific countries

  Currently, I’m receiving many bot visits from the United States and Malaysia. I would like these visits not to be recorded in SalesIQ. I already enabled the option to exclude traffic from cloud service providers, but I’m still receiving bot visits. Ideally,

• My client requires me to have custom pdf file names to except payment for invoices, how can I customize this before emailing.

  Hello! I love the program so far but there are a few things that are standing in the way. I hope you guys can code them in so I can keep the program for years to come. My client requires I customize the pdf file names I send in for billing. Can you please

• Next Page