Existence or OccurrenceThe audit objective related to existence or occurrence is to establish with evidence that assets, liabilities, and equities actually exist and that revenue and expense transactions actually occurred. Thus, auditors count cash and inventory, confirm receivables and insurance policies, and perform other procedures to obtain evidence related to their specific objectives of determining whether cash, inventory, receivables, insurance in force, and other assets actually exist. You must be careful at this point, however, because the finding of existence alone generally proves little about the other four assertions.A special aspect of existence or occurrence is cutoff. Cutoff refers to recognizing assets and liabilities as of a proper date and accounting for revenue, expense, and other transactions in the proper period. Simple cutoff errors can occur: (1) when a company records late December sales invoices for goods not actually shipped until January or (2) when a company records cash receipts through the end of the week (e.g., Friday, January 4) and the last batch for the year should have been. processed on December 31. In auditor's jargon, the cutoff date refers to the client's year-end balance sheet date. Proper cutoff means accounting for all transactions that occurred during a period and neither postponing some recordings to the next period nor accelerating next-period transactions into the current year accounts.