Other Current Liabilities

What Are Other Current Liabilities?

Other current liabilities, in financial accounting, are categories of short-term debt that are lumped together on the liabilities side of the balance sheet. The term "current liabilities" refers to items of short-term debt that a firm must pay within 12 months. To that, companies add the word "other" to describe those current liabilities that are not significant enough to identify separately on their own lines in financial statements, so they are grouped together as "other current liabilities."

Other current liabilities may be contrasted with other current assets, found on the assets side of the balance sheet.

Understanding Other Current Liabilities

Before you can understand the concept of other current liabilities, you must know what the term current liabilities means.

Other current liabilities are simply current liabilities that are not important enough to occupy their own lines on the balance sheet, so they are grouped together.

Current Liabilities

The current liabilities section of the balance sheet lists the debt obligations that a company must pay within 12 months, as opposed to long-term liabilities, which a company may pay down over time. In addition to the popular accounts payable item, examples of current liabilities consist of things like short-term loans from banks, including a line of credit; notes payable; dividends and interest payable; bond maturity proceeds payable; consumer deposits; reserves for taxes; and accrued benefits and payroll.

Other Current Liabilities

Depending on the company and its industry, you will see many kinds of items listed under other current liabilities. Usually, you can find explanations of these "other" liabilities somewhere in the company's annual report or Form 10-K; they also may be detailed in the footnotes to the financial statements.

Often, you can discern the meaning of the other current liability entry by its name. For example, if a business lists commercial paper or bonds payable as a current liability, you can be fairly confident that the amount listed is what will be paid to the company's bondholders in the short term. The same is true for accrued benefits and payroll; these categories are monies owed to employees as bonuses and salaries, which the company has not yet paid but needs to pay within the year.

Why Use Other Current Liabilities?

Financial statements can become quite complex. If every asset and liability account were listed by line item, the balance sheet could balloon to many pages, which would be less useful to readers. So some companies aggregate their balance sheet accounts for the sake of simplicity; citing other current liabilities on one line as a catch-all for liabilities coming due within the next-12 months that do not fit neatly into any other descriptive line item.

Accounts that require greater transparency often become a single line item, and accounts that are not essential to a firm's core operations may be grouped together as "other."

Special Considerations

Although the footnotes to the balance sheet contain much detail concerning the other current liabilities, these should not be confused with off-balance-sheet financing activities, whose disclosures are also included in the footnotes. Because off-balance-sheet financing adds the potential for manipulating financial statements, these entries in the footnotes are often subject to intense scrutiny by auditors and investors.

Using other current liabilities as a category is standard practice and does not need the level of review often seen with off-balance sheet items.