Expense

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In accounting, an expense represents an event in which an asset is used up or a liability is incurred. In terms of the accounting equation, expenses reduce owners' equity.

The official definition of expense used by International Accounting Standards Board is (quotation from IFRS Framework):

Expenses are decreases in economic benefits during the accounting period in the form of outflows or depletions of assets or incurrences of liabilities that result in decreases in equity, other than those relating to distributions to equity participants. [F.70]

One specific use of the term in accounting is whether a particular expenditure is classified as an expense, which is reported immediately to the investing public in the business's income statement; or whether it is classified as a capital expenditure or an expenditure subject to depreciation, which is not. These latter types of expenditures are reported as expenses eventually, but not immediately, by businesses that use accrual-basis accounting, meaning all large businesses.

In investing, one controversy that mounted throughout 2002 and 2003 was whether companies should report the granting of stock options to employees as an expense on the income statement, or should not report this at all in the income statement, which is what had previously been the norm.