Can revenues of a company be negative?

31.August, 2009

I am making an operating budget with Microsoft Excel. In the first step, I need to make a Revenues Budget. My question is, can the total revenues budgeted be a negative number? My gut feeling is no, because how can there be a.) a negative number of units sold and/or b.) a negative price per unit.

Am I correct in assuming that revenues cannot possibly be a negative number?

Thanks for any help.

In general, I think you would be correct to set it up that way. If you had an allowance account and had returns that exceeded the allowance and current sales in a given month I could picture a negative number at the revenue level, but I think that would be an extreme situation.

Posted by: admin in: revenues 3 Comments »

3 Comments für “Can revenues of a company be negative?”

  1. minstrel1956 sagt:
    31.August, 2009 um 12:33 pm

    Just look at the American Financial Companies like AIG etc.
    References :

  2. joliesf sagt:
    31.August, 2009 um 12:56 pm

    In general, I think you would be correct to set it up that way. If you had an allowance account and had returns that exceeded the allowance and current sales in a given month I could picture a negative number at the revenue level, but I think that would be an extreme situation.
    References :

  3. oldwolf1951 sagt:
    31.August, 2009 um 1:37 pm

    Yes, Revenue can be negative and would be called a Loss instead of a Profit. You can run a company at a Loss by the fact that your Liability is greater than your Assets. You can do this for a short time I think but eventually you will have to declare bankruptcy If you can’t bring in a Profit or at least break even.
    References :

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