Why does my deferred revenue balance not reconcile as expected?

Learn strategies to troubleshoot and resolve discrepancies in your deferred revenue balance for better financial reporting accuracy.

Written By ScaleXP Customer Success (Super Administrator)

Updated at July 17th, 2025

If you are using the ScaleXP deferred revenue journal and find that your balance sheet or revenue are not matching as expected, read more here. ScaleXP's deferred revenue journal page (Journals tab>Deferred Revenue) provides a comparison of both the expected revenue amounts (Section 7) and the expected vs accounting system balance sheet (Section 6). If you find that the amounts in your accounting system are not matching with the amounts calculated by ScaleXP, there are several possible reasons for this.

  1. Your opening balance sheets do not match.  See How to download invoice line level detail behind the deferred revenue journal 
  2. You have not selected all the relevant P&L and balance sheet accounts in "filter accounts by" when calculating your journal in ScaleXP (it is important to select all the mapped deferred revenue liability accounts as well as their matching P&L accounts here, but not any accrued income asset accounts).
  3. You have other manual journals impacting these accounts.  You can see these in the totals in Section 5: Journals Already Posted. (If ScaleXP is not expecting these journals, it will effectively be telling you to reverse them out.)
  4. You have un-invoiced revenue in your P&L accounts, resulting in a different revenue figure for the month than what ScaleXP is expecting based on invoices alone.  See this article on How to add a manual invoice to adjust ScaleXP revenue recognition to match your accounting system 

If you are not using IFRS / GAAP for your journal recommendations, then your suggested journal may also be impacted by back-dated revenue which ScaleXP is assuming you will recognise in prior periods.