accounts receivable

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Accounts receivable

Money owed by customers.

Accounts Receivable

1. Money that a customer owes a company for a good or service purchased on credit. Accounts receivable are current assets for a company and are expected to be paid within a short amount of time, often 10, 30, or 90 days. See also: Collection period.

2. A unit within a company's accounting department that deals with accounts receivable.

accounts receivable

Money owed to a business by customers who have bought goods or services on credit. Accounts receivables are current assets that continually turn into cash as customers pay their bills. Also called receivables.

accounts receivable

see DEBTORS.

References in periodicals archive ?

Book accounts facilitated such transactions by allowing debtors to purchase goods or services on credit, with payment postponed until they could harvest their crops or otherwise acquire commodity money items.

People figured their book accounts in pounds, shillings, and pence, not in bushels, pecks, and weights.

Relying as they did on a creditor's willingness to extend credit to people who did not expressly bind themselves to repay the debt, book accounts implied a measure of trust between creditor and debtor.

Priest argues the contrary--that the "[r]elations of trust" and "community-oriented consciousness" reflected in book accounts were "a response to currency scarcity" and "represent[ed] efforts to overcome it in order to promote exchange," (37) thereby implying that the sense of community described by historians among neighbors who worshiped together every Sunday, who knew one another's affairs intimately, who supplied one another with goods and services, and whose children married one another would never have existed but for a shortage of coin or paper money.

One mark of how well written credit instruments could provide this assurance was that, unlike book accounts, they were assignable--an essential feature in a proper credit system, which requires that debts be transferable.

Law, economy, and society in early New England. (Correspondence)

Now fans can bank with Bowie as he has launched his on-line service Bowiebanc, offering mortgages, free online bill paying services, a five per cent annual interest rate on cheque book accounts and a 24-hour service.