Sundry Income

Categories: Accounting

There are things in this world that we can control, and there are things that we can’t. This is true in our personal lives (who could’ve predicted that it would hail throughout our entire outdoor wedding ceremony?) and it’s true for businesses as well. And when companies have random, miscellaneous income they can’t control, they call it “sundry income.”

Random, miscellaneous income we can’t control? Sounds like a nice problem to have, doesn’t it? It sure does, but it’s not like big bags of money are dropping out of the sky into these company’s bank accounts. No, “sundry income” usually comes from things like royalties, foreign exchange gains, capital gains on investments…stuff like that. It’s all the random, unpredictable, and usually somewhat trivial income that a business generates outside of its main operations, and it has to be disclosed, and—of course—taxed. So sundry income might not be quite as cool as big bags of money dropping from the sky, but it’s definitely cooler than hail at an outdoor wedding.



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