Revenue Management: #10 Common Mistakes while Recognizing Revenue

Revenue Management: #10 Common Mistakes while Recognizing Revenue


We are at the end of the series on Revenue Management, covering how different businesses recognise revenue. Even with clear standards like ASC 606 and IFRS 15 in practice, businesses often struggle with the nuances of revenue recognition. Especially growing businesses that are so keen on scaling take a wrong foot.


Where do businesses often go wrong, and how can they avoid it? 


Here are some of the common mistakes businesses make and suggestions for avoiding them before they cause us harm.


Recognizing Revenue Early
A common mistake is recording the full value of a contract or an invoice as recognized immediately upon payment, especially for services or subscriptions delivered over time. This inflates revenue in the short term and understates liabilities.

To avoid this, Businesses should ensure revenue is recognized only when performance obligations are met, not when billing or cash collection. This avoids overstating earnings in the short term and ensures compliance with ASC 606/IFRS 15. Deferred revenue schedules and automated recognition tools can help align recognition with delivery.

Ignoring Performance Obligation
Many companies fail to separate multiple deliverables in a contract, such as onboarding, training, support, or updates. This results in an improper allocation of revenue across the contract's life.

Contracts often include multiple deliverables, such as onboarding, training, or ongoing support. Each should be treated as a separate performance obligation, and revenue should be allocated based on its standalone selling price.

Overlooking Discounts
Revenue must be recognized based on the actual transaction price, not the list price. Failing to adjust the discounts, credits, or rewards provided will inflate the financial figures.

To overcome this, Revenue must be recorded at the true transaction price, not the list price. Discounts, reductions, credits, and incentives should be factored in from the start, and estimates for variable consideration should be reassessed periodically. This ensures reported revenue reflects the real value of the customer contracts.

Failing to Update Contract Amendments
Mid-term changes like upgrades, downgrades, or cancellations must be tracked properly. A reassessment must be performed based on the revised obligations and the revenue that remains deferred. Many companies fail to do this or skip this recalibration step.

Upgrades, downgrades, extensions, or cancellations require proper revenue reassessment. Businesses should clearly distinguish whether a change creates a new contract or modifies the existing one. Automated systems that recalculate deferred balances can simplify this process and ensure accurate reporting.

Manual Spreadsheets
Racking revenue manually through spreadsheets increases the risk of errors, especially when managing deferrals, returns, or variable billing models. Automating this process with tools like Zoho Billing ensures accurate, hassle-free recognition with audit-ready reporting.

Manual spreadsheets are prone to errors and limit scalability. Adopting automated revenue recognition software ensures accuracy and reduces compliance risk. Strong internal policies, approval workflows, and finance team training enhance accuracy and reliability. 



Notes
Key Takeaway

With the right processes and tools, these challenges can be avoided. Businesses that invest in automation and adopt best practices early on will be better positioned to scale sustainably while maintaining compliance with recognition standards. 

Zoho Billing is designed to simplify revenue management by automating recognition, tracking contract changes, handling deferred revenue schedules, and ensuring audit-ready compliance. It provides the accuracy, transparency and scalability needed for growing businesses to keep revenue recognition on the right foot. 
​






    • 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

    • Global Search placement in the new UI

      Having a hard time with the global search placement in the UI redesign. Surely I can't be the only one. Previously global search placement was perfect. A bar at the top/center of the page. Exactly where you would expect it to be. Since the new UI has

    • Dynamically Fetching Lookup Field Display Value

      I have an audit trail form, Audit_Changes, that tracks old vs new values across different forms. For lookup fields, the old/new value is the ID, but I also need the display value. What's a best practice for dynamically fetching the display value of the

    • CRM x WorkDrive: File storage for new CRM signups is now powered by WorkDrive

      Availability Editions: All DCs: All Release plan: Released for new signups in all DCs. It will be enabled for existing users in a phased manner in the upcoming months. Help documentation: Documents in Zoho CRM Manage folders in Documents tab Manage files

    • InvokeURL butchering JSON for OpenAI API calls

      My organization works with mostly educational institutions. We have a custom module called "Schools", which is the user-entered school name they put when using our service (which they enter along with their state and zip code). We want to map this to

    • Is it possible to pull the Zoho desk data into Zoho analytics in real time

      Hi - I am looking to add more dashboards and reports of Zoho Desk in analytics. I see there is a schedule to pull the data into analytics, but I'm wondering if there is an option to pull the data in real time instead of a specific interval?

    • Contact's title in "Contact Role Mapping"

      When I'm creating a deal, I'd like to see the contacts title in the listing. Right now, I only see this: How can I get the contact's title in there?

    • Microsoft Teams now available as an online meeting provider

      Hello everyone, We're pleased to announce that Zoho CRM now supports Microsoft Teams as an online meeting provider—alongside the other providers already available. Admins can enable Microsoft Teams directly from the Preferences tab under the Meetings

    • Account in Quick View Filter

      I have a report that I often run against a specific Account. Every time, I have to go into the edit menu and change the Advanced Filter. I would prefer to use the Quick View Filter, but it does not allow me to use the one and only field that makes any

    • Account in Quick View Filter

      I have a report that I often run against a specific Account. Every time, I have to go into the edit menu and change the Advanced Filter. I would prefer to use the Quick View Filter, but it does not allow me to use the one and only field that makes any

    • Ability to Create New Items When Zoho Trident is Minimized via tray or taskbar icon

      Allow users to create new items (emails, calendar events, tasks, etc.) directly from the system tray icon or by right clicking the task bar icon, even when the window is minimized or not actively running in the foreground. This enables quick access to

    • Bug Report and Suggestions for Improvement in Zoho Applications

      Hi Zoho Team, I’d like to report a few bugs and improvement suggestions I’ve noticed while using Zoho products: Zoho Cliq Video Call: The camera sometimes turns off automatically during video calls. This seems to be a bug — please check and fix it. Zoho

    • Enhancements to the formula field in Zoho CRM: Auto-refresh formulas with the "Now" function, stop formula executions based on criteria, and include formulas within formulas

      Dear Customers, We hope you're well! By their nature, modern businesses rely every day on computations, whether it's to calculate the price of a product, assess ROI, evaluate the lifetime value of a customer, or even determine the age of a record. With

    • I can not see Undeliverable emails from my Mass Email Leads activity in CRM

      I am sending email templates and I can not see the Undeliverables? I only receive the "Out of Office" replies and any manual replies from the lead. Can you please let me know where the Undeliverable emails are sent so I can use the information to clean up the database?

    • Select Zoho Contacts as Meeting Participants in Zoho Cliq

      Hello Zoho Cliq Team, We hope you're doing well. We would like to request an enhancement to the meeting scheduling functionality in Zoho Cliq. Current Limitation: When scheduling a meeting in Zoho Cliq, participants can only be selected from: Organization

    • Creating Secret via Vault API

      Hi I am trying to create a secret through vault api.  This is the response I get. One thing I am not sure is how to decrypt the secretdata, how to get the secrettypeid? {     "operation": {         "result": {             "error_code": "",             "message": "Sorry, we are unable to process your request.",

    • Ability to Select External Users from Participants List When Scheduling Meetings

      Hello Zoho Cliq Team, We hope you're doing well. We would like to request an enhancement to the meeting scheduling experience in Zoho Cliq. Current Limitation when scheduling a meeting in Zoho Cliq: External users can be selected from the list only under

    • Kaizen #212 - Map Dependency Fields in Zoho CRM using APIs

      Welcome back to another week of Kaizen! Over the past few weeks, we have been addressing your questions and feedback shared through our Kaizen 200th feedback form. Thank you for your continued engagement and thoughtful queries. We truly enjoy helping

    • Enhancing Zia's service with better contextual responses and article generation

      Hello everyone, We are enhancing Zia's Generative AI service to make your support experience smarter. Here's how: Increased accuracy with Qwen One of the key challenges in AI is delivering responses that are both contextually accurate and empathetic while

    • CRM for email in Outlook: how to ignore addresses?

      We’re using the "Zoho CRM for email" add-in for Outlook. When opening an email, the add-in displays all email addresses from the message and allows me to add them to the CRM or shows if they’re already contacts. However, sometimes people listed in To

    • Zoho Sign Reminder email template

      Is there a template we can edit for the reminder emails? I don't see it in Settings / Choose a template

    • Outdated state in mexico

      Hello Zoho team, the drop down to add the state for customers, when they introduce their state in mexico has a city named “Distrito Federal” that name changed many years ago to “ciudad de mexico”. could you please update this so my clients can find the

    • Is anyone using Zoho Flow with airtable?

      I need to build a flow that collects data from airtable and uses some of that data to create folders and files in google drive. I have fully function version of this in zapier and want to migrate to zoho. I am trying to perform a very basic fetch from

    • Default in fields on Form B based on the user selection in Form A

      Hi Everyone, I have added an action button to a form report to bring up a new form based on user selection, see it indicated in red below: Then when the ne form loads, I want to default in some of the fields based on the record the user was selected on.

    • SOME FEATURES ARE NOT IN THE ZOHO SHEET IN COMPARISION TO ZOHO SHEET

      TO ZOHO sir/maam with due to respect i want to say that i am using ZOHO tool which is spreadsheet i want to say that some features are not there in zoho sheet as comparison to MS EXCEL like advance filter and other Features which should be there in ZOHO

    • Organization Emails in Email History

      How can I make received Org Emails to show up here?

    • AI in Zoho Workplace: A Sneak Peek into What’s Coming!

      Hello everyone, We’re super excited to share something we’ve been working on and we want you to be part of it! You may have seen our announcement blog post introducing a major evolution in how AI works within Zoho Workplace. Want to be among the first

    • Display Client Name in Zoho Creator Client Portal Dashboard

      Hello Zoho Creator Team, We hope you are doing well. Zoho Creator recently introduced the option to set a client’s display name in the Client Portal settings, which is very helpful for providing a personalized portal experience. However, there is currently

    • Meet Canvas' Grid component: Your easiest way to build responsive record templates

      Visual design can be exciting—until you're knee-deep in the details. Whether it's aligning text boxes to prevent overlaps, fixing negative space, or simply making sure the right data stands out, just ironing out inconsistencies takes a lot of moving parts.

    • Migrate file from Single File Upload to Multi File Upload

      Dears, I have created a new field Multi File Upload to replace the old Single File Upload field. I'd like to ask you guys what is the best way to migrate the files to the new field?

    • Best way to share/download presentation files in Zoho without losing formatting?

      Hello Zoho Community, I often work with PPT/PDF files in Zoho Docs and share them with colleagues. While PDFs usually give a direct download option, I’ve noticed that PPT/PPTX files sometimes only open in the viewer without a clear download link. Is there

    • Workflow Failure - Notifications

      Good afternoon, I have just experienced an error whereby a Workflow failed, for a reason currently unknown. The problem is that one of my users had to flag this manually (thankfully he's very thorough) and this otherwise would have flown under the radar.

    • Introducing Bin Locations In Zoho Inventory

      Hello users, We are excited to let you know that your wait for the Bin Locations feature has now come to an end! Yes, you heard us right! We are here to introduce the much-awaited Bin Locations now in Zoho Inventory. But before we dive into the feature

    • Error "Invalid client task found corresponding properties" only when triggered from workflow ?

      Hi All, I am facing an error message I never encountered previously: Error in executing On Add - On Load script Error in executing thisapp.get_all_projects_api_call function. Line:(2) Error in executing thisapp.getAccessTokenFromRefreshToken function.

    • How to setup pricing in Zoho

      Hi everyone, I am relatively new here and have just moved from my old inventory system to the Zoho one. I am trying to get my head around how it all works. I am mostly setup connected to a shopify store, but I do manual sales also For manual invoicing,

    • Is it possible to create a word cloud chart in ZoHo Analystics?

      Hi there, I have a volume of transaction text that I would like to analyse using word cloud (or other approcah to detect and present word frequency in a dataset). For example, I have 50,000 records describing menu items in restaurants. I want to be able

    • How to interpret Campaign report statistics - definitions/explanation

      I am trying to make sure I understand the Campaign report correctly Do you have a list of definitions for: Delivered - it has reached the recipient's inbox Campaign reach - is this the number that have opened the campaign email? Unique Opens Clicks/Open

    • Add Custom Reports To Dashboard or Home Tab

      Hi there, I think it would be great to be able to add our custom reports to the Home Tab or Dashboards. Thanks! Chad

    • Feature request - pin or flag note

      Hi, It would be great if you could either pin or flag one or more notes so that they remain visible when there are a bunch of notes and some get hidden in the list. Sometimes you are looking for a particular name that gets lost in a bunch of less important

    • How do I filter contacts by account parameters?

      Need to filter a contact view according to account parameter, eg account type. Without this filter users are overwhelmed with irrelevant contacts. Workaround is to create a custom 'Contact Type' field but this unbearable duplicity as the information already

    • Maximum limit of rows exceeded

      I am trying to add a row to a spreadsheets that has fewer than 60 rows. I keep getting an error message that says I have exceeded the maximum limit of 65,536 rows. Any ideas out there?

    • Next Page