Other Short-Term Assets

Category

Balance Sheet

Units

Currency

US-GAAP elements

OtherAssetsCurrentPrepaidExpenseAndOtherAssetsCurrent

Reference

Regulation S-X Rule 5-02.8 (Other current assets)

Source

Reported in SEC EDGAR filings (US-GAAP XBRL taxonomy)

Other short-term assets are current assets that a company does not report under a more specific caption such as cash, short-term investments, receivables, inventory, or prepaid expenses. They are resources the company expects to turn into cash, sell, or use up within a year (or its operating cycle, if longer), gathered into a single residual line.

What goes into the line varies by company. Common examples include contract assets, deposits, income taxes receivable, short-term derivative assets, restricted cash, and deferred costs expected to be expensed within the year.

Regulation S-X Rule 5-02.8 provides the caption for other current assets and asks companies to show separately, on the balance sheet or in a note, any amount within it that exceeds 5 percent of total current assets. Anything below that threshold can be combined. In XBRL, companies use OtherAssetsCurrent for the residual, and many combine it with prepayments as PrepaidExpenseAndOtherAssetsCurrent, which makes the prepaid portion hard to separate without the footnote.

Because the line is defined by what is excluded, comparing it across companies means little on its own. The same kind of item, a derivative asset or a tax refund receivable, may be presented separately by one filer and folded into other current assets by another. The footnotes on prepaid and other current assets, or on the balance sheet components, usually give the breakdown.

For liquidity analysis, most of these items are less liquid than cash or receivables. Prepaid costs and deferred charges will never convert into cash; they are consumed. That is why stricter measures such as the quick ratio leave them out, and why a rising balance in this line lifts the current ratio without adding much real capacity to pay bills. Watch for sudden growth, which can signal costs being deferred rather than expensed.