Accrued expenses and accounts payable get used interchangeably at most companies, right up until an audit or a close review shows they've been misclassified for two quarters running. The distinction is small on paper and expensive in practice: one is a confirmed invoice, the other is an estimate, and mixing them up understates or overstates every close it touches.
The rule that sorts it out: if your team received the goods or the service before month-end, the expense belongs in that month's books, whether or not the invoice has shown up yet. That's the accrual process in one sentence, and everything else in this guide is the mechanics of doing it correctly.
An expense accrual is a journal entry that recognizes a cost in the period it was incurred, before cash changes hands. It sits on the balance sheet as a liability (usually "accrued liabilities" or "accrued expenses") until the real invoice arrives and the entry reverses.
What does expense accrual mean?
An expense accrual is a liability recorded for a cost incurred but not yet paid or invoiced, under accrual-basis accounting. It ensures the expense lands in the period it actually happened, not the period the bill arrives.
This is the mechanic that separates accrual-basis accounting from cash-basis accounting. Under cash basis, an expense doesn't exist until you pay it. Under accrual basis, which is what GAAP and most lenders, auditors, and boards require, an expense exists the moment you're obligated to pay it, invoice or not.
Accrued expense vs. accounts payable, quickly: accounts payable is a known bill sitting in your AP system waiting for payment. An accrual is an estimated liability for a cost you know happened but haven't been billed for yet: a contractor who worked in March but invoices in April, a utility bill that always lags three weeks, freight that's landed but not yet reconciled with the carrier.
Take a sales commission plan as a working example. Reps close deals in March, but commissions aren't calculated and paid until mid-April, after quota attainment is finalized. The company owes that money for March performance. If it's not accrued, March profit looks better than it actually was, and April looks artificially expensive when the real payout lands.
Skipping step 4 is the most common way accruals quietly break a close: the estimate stays on the books, the real payout posts on top of it, and March's commission expense is now counted twice.
An accrual that's off by a small amount rarely breaks anything on its own. The risk is that it's a recurring estimate, and recurring estimates compound. Macy's disclosed an accounting error tied to under-accrued shipping costs that, over several quarters, added up to somewhere in the $130 to $150 million range. The problem wasn't one bad entry; it was the same understatement repeating every close. That's the pattern worth watching for internally: not "did we miss one," but "is this estimate consistently wrong in the same direction."
Manually tracking unbilled costs across departments, chasing vendor confirmations, and remembering which entries need reversing is exactly the kind of recurring, rules-based work that expense management and close-automation tools are built to remove. Point solutions like Gappify focus specifically on automating vendor-confirmation accruals for procurement-heavy companies.
Broader expense platforms like ExpensePoint handle the adjacent problem: flagging expenses that were incurred in one period but submitted or approved in another, so the accrual owner isn't relying on someone's memory of a March trip that got expensed in April. Either way, the goal is the same: replace a manual, easy-to-forget step with something that surfaces the liability automatically.
If you're still deciding which accounting method fits your business overall, see Accounting Method: Cash or Accrual, Which Should You Choose?.