Count of accruals booked at one period close that were reversed at the next. High counts signal estimate quality problems or accrual hygiene issues.
At a glance
The number of accrual journal entries posted at the prior period close that reversed into the current period. In Sage Intacct most accruals are booked as reversing journal entries (the reversal auto-posts on the first day of the next period) or as recurring entries cleared by hand. A clean ledger expects a handful of these every month. A spike means the estimates feeding your accruals are wrong, the accrual was a plug rather than a measured liability, or someone is booking round-number accruals at close to hit a target and unwinding them quietly the next day. The card counts the reversed cohort so the Controller can read estimate quality at a glance instead of reverse-engineering it from the GL detail.
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Sage data by matching prior-close accrual journals to their reversals in the current period. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A UK-based multi-entity ecommerce group on Sage Intacct, three trading entities (UK Retail Ltd in GBP, EU Distribution BV in EUR, US Wholesale Inc in USD), consolidated monthly. Annual group revenue ~£40M. Snapshot taken at the May 26 close, posted 6 Jun 26. Reporting currency GBP. Default reversal alert threshold of 10.
Five things to notice:
- 27 reversals is well above the threshold of 10, and the headline alone does not tell you whether that is a problem; the dimensional cut does. Twenty-seven reversals in one close is high for a £40M group. But the count splits into two very different stories. The marketing, carriage, bonus, and goods-received-not-invoiced accruals (22 of the 27) are legitimate, measured liabilities that reverse because the real invoice has now arrived. That is healthy accrual hygiene working exactly as designed. The five round-number true-up accruals are the signal worth chasing, because round numbers booked at close and reversed the next day are the classic shape of earnings management or a plug used to hit a covenant or a board number. The card does not accuse anyone; it surfaces the cohort so the Controller can ask the question.
- Goods-received-not-invoiced (GRNI) at 9 reversals is the largest single source and it is usually benign. When goods are received against a purchase order in the Inventory Control or Order Entry module but the supplier invoice has not arrived by close, Intacct (or the AP automation) accrues the expected cost. The next period the real invoice posts and the accrual reverses. Nine of these is normal for a distribution business with active inbound. The thing to watch is not the count but the variance: if the accrued amount and the actual invoiced amount differ by more than a few percent consistently, the standard costs feeding the accrual are stale. Pair this with Landed Cost Variance vs Standard to see whether GRNI reversals are clean or hiding a costing drift.
- The five round-number true-up accruals are the only entries here that deserve a name-and-explanation review. A measured accrual is rarely a round number. A marketing accrual is £12,840, not £15,000. When close accruals land on £15,000, £20,000, £50,000 and reverse the next day with no supporting calculation, the Controller should pull the JE memo and the preparer. Most of the time the explanation is innocent (a genuine estimate rounded for simplicity), but this is exactly the cohort an external auditor will sample first, so it is better for finance to have the answer ready before the audit than to be asked cold. Pivot by Department to see whether the round-number accruals concentrate in one team.
- A rising trend matters more than the absolute count. Twenty-seven this close against a trailing average of, say, twelve is the real story. A climbing reversal count usually means one of three things: the business is growing and the volume of genuine accruals is scaling (benign), the estimates are getting worse and accruals are being corrected more often (estimate-quality problem), or close discipline is slipping and people are accruing-and-reversing to smooth results (control problem). The 30-day trailing comparison on the card is what separates a one-off spike from a structural drift. On this account the count had climbed from 14 to 27 over three closes, which prompted the review.
- Pair with Manual JEs as % of Total to separate automated reversals from hand-keyed ones. Auto-reversing JEs created by the system (the GRNI accruals, the standard freight accrual) are low-risk because the process is repeatable and auditable. Manual reversals keyed by a person at close are the higher-risk cohort, because each one is a judgement call with no system control behind it. If the reversal count is high but the manual-JE share is low, the accrual machine is just busy, not broken. If both are high, that is the combination an audit committee should look at. On this account the two cards read together showed that 22 of the 27 reversals were system-generated and only 5 were manual, which materially de-risked the headline.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against Sage
Where to look in Sage Intacct: The native Sage Intacct views to run side by side with this card:
General Ledger → All → Journal Entries filtered to the prior close period with reversing entries shown, then to the current period for the matching reversals
Reports → General Ledger → Account Activity on the accrual liability accounts (typically the 2xxx accrued-liabilities nominal range) to see the post-and-reverse pattern across the period boundary
General Ledger → Recurring Transactions to see the recurring JE templates that auto-reverse, distinguishing them from one-off manual accruals
Interactive Custom Report (ICR) built on the GL data source filtered to state = Reversed and grouped by source batch, counting matched original-to-reversal pairs in the close window
Audit Trail on the accrual batches to see who created, posted, and reversed each entry, which is the fastest way to attribute round-number accruals to a preparer
In Intacct the cleanest native equivalent is to filter Journal Entries on the reversing flag for the close period and tie each to its reversal in the next period. For Multi-Entity Console accounts run the GL Account Activity report at the same entity scope as the dashboard filter, otherwise reversals in entities outside the filter will not appear in the native report but will (if scoped in) on the card.
Common reconciliation pitfalls:
- Recurring vs accrual reversals: Intacct’s recurring journals (rent, depreciation) also reverse or repeat. The card excludes pure-recurring templates by default; a native Journal Entries listing includes them, so the native count will usually read higher than the card.
- Reversal date vs original date: a reversal posted on the first day of the new period belongs (in this card’s logic) to the prior close that created the original. Native reports list it under the current period date, which can make the two appear to disagree until you align on which close “owns” the pair.
- Partial reversals: a manual JE that backs out only part of a prior accrual counts as one reversal on the card but may look like a fresh entry in a naive native listing. The card matches on the source-batch pointer, not on amount.
Cross-connector reconciliation:
The cross-connector value here is attribution. Sage Intacct knows that an accrual reversed; the commerce connectors know what actually happened in the period (the marketing spend, the freight cost, the bonus pool). When a reversal pattern correlates with a commerce-side signal (a marketing accrual that keeps reversing while ad spend in the Google Ads connector keeps climbing), the cause is usually a timing mismatch between when spend is committed and when the invoice lands. That is a fixable process problem, and seeing the two systems side by side is how the Controller finds it without a forensic GL trawl.