What Is the Quick Ratio? Definition and Formula

The quick ratio is an indicator of a company’s short-term liquidity position and measures a company’s ability to meet its short-term obligations with its most liquid assets. The current ratio is important because it helps to assess your firm’s liquidity position and financial health. It calculates if the company’s current assets are enough to cover its short-term obligations. A company can convert quick assets to cash in less than 90 days, while some current assets can take up to a year. The quick ratio is a more conservative measure of liquidity than the current ratio.

Its cloud-based system tracks all your financial information and gives you fast access to your current assets and liabilities. You can spend less time running the numbers and more time driving success. For some companies, however, inventories are considered a quick asset – it depends entirely on the nature of the business, but such cases are extremely rare.

Going Beyond DAU/MAU Metrics for Growth

Assets include cash, accounts receivable, short-term investments, and inventory. The quick ratio offers a more stringent test of a company’s liquidity than the current ratio. The quick ratio—sometimes called the quick assets ratio or the acid-test—serves as an indicator of a company’s short-term liquidity, or its ability to meet its short-term obligations.

• It’s also called the acid test ratio, or the quick liquidity ratio because it uses quick assets, or those that can be converted to cash within 90 days or less.
• A company can’t exist without cashflow and the ability to pay its bills as they come due.
• But generally speaking, companies aim to meet their obligations from operating cash flow, not by using their assets.
• It indicates that the company is fully equipped with exactly enough assets to be instantly liquidated to pay off its current liabilities.

Keep in mind that industry, location, markets, etc. can also play a role in what a good quick ratio is. Do your research to find out what ratio your business should be aiming for. A very high quick ratio, such as three or above, is not always a good thing. Small businesses are prone to unexpected financial hits that can disrupt cash flow. If there’s a cash shortage, you may have to dig into your personal funds to pay employees, lenders, and bills.

How Do Client Payments Affect a Business’s Quick Ratio?

Marketable securities are financial instruments that are actively traded, have an identifiable value, and can be readily converted to cash. Equity securities are investments in a company that allow the investor partial ownership of the company. Debt securities offer a guaranteed interest payment in exchange for borrowed money. Both the quick and current ratios measure your company’s short-term liquidity. However, they do not have the same formulas and don’t include all of the same assets.

You can subtract inventory and current prepaid assets from current assets, and divide that difference by current liabilities. The quick ratio looks at only the most liquid assets that a company has available to service short-term debts and obligations. Liquid assets are those that can quickly and easily be converted into cash in order to pay those bills. The quick ratio pulls all current liabilities from a company’s balance sheet as it does not attempt to distinguish between when payments may be due. The quick ratio assumes that all current liabilities have a near-term due date. Total current liabilities are often calculated as the sum of various accounts including accounts payable, wages payable, current portions of long-term debt, and taxes payable.

What Is a Quick Ratio (Acid-Test Ratio)?

Editorial content from The Ascent is separate from The Motley Fool editorial content and is created by a different analyst team. Due to different characteristics, some industries may have an average quick ratio that seems high or low. Get instant access to video lessons taught by experienced investment bankers. Learn financial statement modeling, DCF, M&A, LBO, Comps and Excel shortcuts. The inventory balance of our company expands from $80m in Year 1 to $155m in Year 4, reflecting an increase of $75m.

While your bookkeeper or staff accountant can certainly calculate a quick ratio, it’s best to let an experienced accountant provide the follow-up analysis on what the quick ratio results mean for your company. The quick ratio is easy to calculate using the highlighted figures from the balance sheet in Macy’s 2022 Annual Report, for the fiscal year ending January 28, 2023. There are several versions of the quick ratio formula, but they all include the same components. A high ratio may indicate that the company is sitting on a large surplus of cash that could be better utilized. For example, the company could invest that money or use it to explore new markets.

Business 101

In addition, the Quick ratio doesn’t take into account a company’s credit facilities, which can significantly affect its liquidity. The quick ratio measures a company’s ability to raise cash quickly when needed. For investors and lenders, it’s a useful indicator of a company’s resilience. For business managers, it’s one of a suite of liquidity measures they can use to guide business decisions, often with help from their accounting partner. This may include cash and savings, marketable securities (stocks and bonds), and accounts receivable (money owed to the company by customers and clients).

• In other words, a company shouldn’t incur a lot of cost and time to liquidate the asset.
• Assets include cash, accounts receivable, short-term investments, and inventory.
• A quick ratio above one is excellent because it shows an even match between your assets and liabilities.
• Treasury bill with a maturity date of three months or less, upon acquisition by the company, qualifies as a cash equivalent.
• This means that Carole can pay off all of her current liabilities with quick assets and still have some quick assets left over.

As the quick ratio only wants to reflect the cash that could be on hand, the formula should not include any receivables a company does not expect to receive. This means the accounts receivable balance on the company’s balance sheet could be overstated. Also, the company’s current liabilities might be due now, while its incoming cash from accounts receivable may not come in for 30 to 45 days.

The higher the quick ratio, the more financially stable a company tends to be, as you can use ‌the quick ratio for better business decision-making. Yet, the broader concern here is that the cause of the accumulating inventory balance is due to declining sales or lackluster customer demand for the company’s products/services. However, an extremely high quick ratio isn’t necessarily a good sign, since it may indicate the company is sitting on a significant amount of capital that could be better invested to expand the business. Ideally, accountants and finance professionals should use multiple metrics to understand a company’s status. The quick ratio may also be more appropriate for industries where inventory faces obsolescence.

Both ratios measure the company’s financial health, but they’re slightly different. The quick ratio is considered more conservative than the current ratio because it doesn’t use as many financial metrics. The quick ratio measures the dollar amount of liquid assets against a company’s liabilities coming due within a year.

Consider a company with $1 million of current assets, 85% of which is tied up in inventory. The quick ratio communicates how well a company will be able to pay its short-term debts using only the most liquid of assets. The ratio is important because it signals to internal management and external investors whether the company will run out of cash. The quick ratio also holds more value than other liquidity ratios such as the current ratio because it has the most conservative approach on reflecting how a company can raise cash.