I'm not sure I understand the concern you have here or the purpose of comparing WIP current assets + Unbilled disbursements to revenue.
As I understand it (correct me if wrong): - WIP current assets + Unbilled disbursements should equate (very roughly) to the amount of "cash receipts from customers" that we would expect to see in the following year's cashflow on the report. i.e. if we got $232m in 2019 then we would expect to see 2020 cash receipts of around this amount noting that it wont be exactly this since the WIP assumes which cases will succeed and fail and there may be cases that resolve start to finish within one year, etc.
- Revenue however is the amount of fees chargeable for work conducted within the year - noting that the customer will only be billed if and when the case is won which could be many years later, depending. Revenue recorded for any given case in a year might get recorded as part of current WIP, non-current WIP, and unbilled disbursements depending on when we expect the customer to be charged for that work. And some revenue will never show up in any of these numbers for work where the customer pays their bill in the same year the work is performed.
So WIP current assets + Unbilled disbursements is cash that will (probably) be received next year, but revenue is cash that might be received at any time from the current year to the next few years. Based on the above view of these numbers I'm not sure there is much we can tell from comparing these headline numbers directly against each other.
Am I misunderstanding something here?
SHJ Price at posting:
90.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
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