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Unearned Revenue: What it is and What it Means for Subscription Businesses

Stax

The concept of unearned revenue can easily trip up SaaS companies that offer subscription services and products on a recurring basis. Unlike when selling ordinary products, you cannot recognize the revenue earned from a subscription all at once. So, what differentiates ‘earned’ versus ‘unearned revenue’?

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Understanding Deferred Revenue and Its Impact on Your SaaS Business

Subscription Flow

Deferred revenue refers to the income that you have collected, but not yet earned. The GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) issued by the FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board), inform businesses when their revenue should be recognized. This is where the concept of deferred revenue comes in.

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The SaaS Financial Model You’ll Actually Update (Updated 2019)

Baremetrics

Since the original version of this post from early 2017, we’ve worked with many more SaaS companies and a common theme has been moving companies from a starter template to a more robust financial model. This model allowed me to work with dozens of SaaS startups using spreadsheets, while we built our financial modeling software Flightpath.

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From Quoting to Cash: Why Integration Is the Real Differentiator in Agile Billing—According to MGI Research

Blulogix

According to MGI Research’s 2025 Agile Billing Top 50 Buyer’s Guide , integration across the quote-to-cash (Q2C) process is one of the key gaps holding companies back from achieving true billing agility. Ready to see how BluIQ can transform your billing process and help you achieve integrated, automated, and accurate complex monetization?

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Managing Deferred Revenue for SaaS Companies: Best Practices for Tracking, Reporting, and Analysis

SaaS Metrics

When a customer pays for a service upfront that won’t be delivered until later in the future, the company does receive the cash. But the revenue generated from the advance payment cannot be marked as earned — at least not until the service has been rendered. This unearned revenue is called deferred.

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SaaS Balance Sheet Examples

Baremetrics

In the case of a SaaS business, your most valuable assets are the contracts you have with your clients and the platform they use. Speaking of your users, it is important to understand how much revenue they are generating with the best possible estimates of your MRR and ARR. How are balance sheets unique for SaaS? Fixed assets 3.

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What Is Working Capital?

Baremetrics

Baremetrics makes it easy to collect and visualize all of your sales data so that you always know how much cash you have on hand, which clients have paid, and who you still owe services to. Check out what the MRR dashboard looks like right here: Baremetrics can monitor your SaaS quick ratio. Many SaaS businesses have zero inventory.