An invoice accrual, referred to in French accounting as a Facture à Recevoir (FAR), is an accounting entry that recognizes a liability for goods or services that have been received but for which no supplier invoice has yet been received or processed at the close of an accounting period. It is a fundamental mechanism of accrual-basis accounting: costs must be recognized in the period they are incurred, not when the invoice arrives.
FAR entries are typically created at month-end or year-end close for every open goods receipt or service completion that hasn't been matched to a final invoice. The accounting team estimates the amount due based on the purchase order, the delivery note, or the contract, and reverses the entry in the following period when the actual invoice is received.
The operational challenge is twofold. First, identifying which deliveries and services are missing their invoices at close requires a complete, up-to-date view of unmatched purchase orders and delivery notes, information that is rarely consolidated in a single place. Teams fall back on partially reliable ERP data, manual trackers, or worse, memory. Second, ensuring that the FAR estimate is accurate enough not to materially misstate the period P&L requires cross-referencing delivery data against contract prices — the same verification that 3-way matching performs for received invoices.
Phacet's balance sheet accruals reconciliation agent and pre-payment controls framework reduce FAR complexity in two ways: by maintaining a real-time view of unmatched purchase orders and delivery notes, making accrual identification systematic rather than manual, and by ensuring that when invoices arrive after close, they are immediately cross-referenced against the FAR entry and the original delivery data, with any discrepancy flagged for review.
For DAFs targeting a continuous close model, automating FAR tracking is the step that transforms period-end accruals from a manual estimation exercise into a data-driven, audit-ready process.
