Accounting of discounts provided by an enterprise at sales of manufactured products

Industrial enterprises often grant discounts to their clients when selling their products. Discounts are used as an element of their marketing policy and as an effective tool for addressing financial issues and successful business management in general. All discounts granted to the buyers must be recorded in accounts of the enterprise’s financial accounting as an accomplished fact of its economic activity, regardless of the goal of their use. But nowadays, patterns of financial accounting of operations with commercial discounts are not regulated by any normative documents; there are no models of their financial accounting, and the existing rules of bookkeeping instruct to document sales revenues after deduction of the discounts granted. In other words, discounts are granted verbally. This is why neither financial accounting nor reporting documents of an enterprise contain any information on discounts granted to buyers. Therefore, it is impossible to create an information base to analyze the efficiency of granted discounts on the basis of financial accounting data. The principle of completeness and continuity of recording all facts of an enterprise’s economic activity gets violated. The article provides currently operating variants of financial accounting of discounts granted to buyers. Their advantages and disadvantages are analyzed from the position of their compliance with economic content of operations with discounts and with the current legislation. The reasons behind methodological problems concerning accounting of granted discounts are studied. Proprietary method of accounting of discounts granted to buyers by manufacturing enterprises when selling the manufactured products is developed. This method allows solving the abovementioned methodological problems.