Auditing hold history and revenue impact
Learn some audit practices to retroactively trace historical hold activity and verify that a hold behaved as expected.
Retroactive Tracing (Investigating past revenue gaps)
If you are reviewing historical revenue recognition patterns and notice that past periods lack expected revenue postings, a previously active hold might be the cause.
How to trace it: Check the Holds History tab on the contract or the Timeline view to see if a hold was applied and released in the past. Compare the exact dates the hold was active against your accounting periods to confirm it aligns with the missing revenue postings or delayed schedules.
Verifying impact by hold type
When auditing a hold's impact, your expectations should change based on the type of hold that was applied:
Auditing a Revenue Hold: Verify that actual revenue schedules are absent during the held period. Because revenue holds block new actual schedule creation entirely, the actual revenue waterfall may be missing or incomplete for the unreleased timeframe.
Troubleshooting: If the waterfall is present but you expected it to be blocked, the hold was likely applied after the revenue was already released or scheduled. Because a revenue hold does not automatically reverse existing schedules, you must manually defer the revenue to achieve the desired accounting impact.
Auditing a Transfer Hold: Verify that the revenue schedules do exist in the subledger for the held period, but were simply not posted or transferred to the General Ledger. The impact here is strictly a delayed GL posting, not missing schedule generation.
Period Close & Catch-up: If the hold remained active during a period close, verify that the unposted schedules/entries were pushed forward to the next open period (after running Sweep Unposted Schedules Program). Upon the release of the hold, these delayed entries, along with the current period's entries, will be posted together in the respective month as a cumulative catch-up.
Post-release verification
After a hold is released, always verify that revenue schedules or GL postings resumed as expected (often appearing as a cumulative "catch-up" entry in the current open period).
Troubleshooting: If the revenue does not resume after the release, investigate the contract for other roadblocks. Check for other active holds, pending approvals, soft-freeze restrictions, a Closed/Posted RC status, verify if the POB/Line is already fully recognized, or check if the revenue requires a separate manual release action to proceed.