Accrued Liability

Companies buy things on credit all the time. Those expenses usually need to be paid in a relatively short period. They are short-term liabilities, which sit on the balance sheet until they are paid, at which point they transcend off the balance sheet and become a line item on the income statement.

Lawn Mowers That Sing, LLC pre-purchases noise-dampening materials for their Pink Lady model, which defaults to Celine Dion and Shania Twain music. The noise-dampening material is mostly sand, packed inside dense burlap, and they buy tons of it at a time, slowly paying off the liability owed to the Sand and Burlap Corporation of Chicago, Illinois over time. Those payments are a short-term liability that is current, and must be paid off on a net 90-day basis.

So that's one form of liability that singing lawn mowers accrue, and it maps to other more traditional forms of accrued liability, like salary and benefits owed, bonuses payable, and vacation days earned that are essentially a debt owed by the company to the employee each year, depending on whether their state is red or blue.