Net of debits and credits at the end of a reporting period. Term applies to a variety of account relationships, such as with banks, credit card companies, brokerage firms, and stores, and to classifications of transactions in a bookkeeping system. The same account may be an asset account balance or a liability account balance, depending on which side of the transaction you are on. For example, your bank balance is an asset account to you and a liability account to the bank. Your credit card (debit) balance is a liability account to you and an asset account (account receivable) to the credit card company.

A type of asset-financing arrangement in which a company uses its receivables - which is money owed by customers - as collateral in a financing agreement. The company receives an amount that is equal to a reduced value of the receivables pledged. The age of the receivables have a large effect on the amount a company will receive. The older the receivables, the less the company can expect. Also referred to as "factoring".

Investopedia Says:

This type of financing helps companies free up capital that is stuck in accounts receivables. Accounts receivable financing transfers the default risk associated with the accounts receivables to the financing company; this transfer of risk can help the company using the financing to shift focus from trying to collect receivables to current business activities.

Andrews, Raymond (1934–1991), novelist, essayist, and winner of first James *Baldwin Prize. Raymond Andrews was born near Madison, Georgia, in Morgan County, the fourth of ten children born to sharecropping parents George and Viola Andrews. He helped with the farm work and absorbed the ambience of rural living that was to color his later writings. Andrews left home at fifteen and worked at a variety of jobs while beginning to write. He eventually took a position in New York City with an airline, a job that enabled him to travel extensively in the United States and Europe.

Raymond Andrews's first published piece was an article on baseball, which appeared in Sports Illustrated in 1975. In 1976, Ataraxia, a small journal edited by Phillip Lee Williams and Linda Williams, excerpted a section from the novel Appalachee Red, which was published in its entirety by Dial Press (1978). Appalachee Red, winner of the first James Baldwin Prize, was followed byRosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennesee (1980) and Baby Sweet's (1983), completing the trilogy about life in the fictional Muskhogean County, Georgia. After Dial Press was closed by its parent group, Doubleday Press, Andrews's books were out of print until 1987, when they were picked up and reprinted by the Brown Thrasher imprint of the University of Georgia Press. Andrews subsequently went to Peachtree Press to publish his next two books, The Last Radio Baby: A Memoir (1991) and Jessie and Jesus and Cousin Clare (1991). Peachtree Press plans to publishOnce Upon a Time in Atlanta, also a memoir, written about the years after Andrews left Madison and moved to Atlanta. Andrews also left manuscripts for two additional novels; their publishing future is unknown.

Andrews's unique style owes a great deal to the cadences of rural southern speech; he noted in the preface to the 1987 edition of Appalachee Red that his “American roots (like those of most Afro-Americans) are southern rural.” He reported that his earliest favorite writers were Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, and John Steinbeck. Indeed, Andrews remarked that the character Pirate in Steinbeck's Tortilla Flat made him realize that the creation of a character was possible.

Andrews primarily drew from a rich lode of oral tradition that he absorbed from his family and community. There are echoes of the southern folk preacher, the streetwise badman who inhabits bars and liquor houses, the folk wisdom of elderly black women who pass on their knowledge to the younger African American girls, and the rhythms of jazz and blues music. Andrews wrote from his own culture, and his broader experiences in the places outside Georgiaonly helped him to focus more clearly on the culture from which he sprang.

His work, like the man himself, is ribald, often obscene, but never vulgar. It is gently ironic, not confrontational, and not intended to be political. Andrews has said that he intended to include all that life includes— sadness, boredom, sex, happiness, violence, and joy— without trying to proselytize and without attempting to change the essential truth of the way life was at a particular time. In fact he took issue with writers who he felt attempted to show only the oppressor and the oppressed. While some of the characters in Andrews's books might be seen as victims, the intent is to show the humanity of all the inhabitants of a community, not to point to the degradation of one race by another.

Appalachee Red (originally titled Red, White, and Blue) explores the way of life of rural blacks in the fictional north Georgia county of Muskhogean, an area much resembling Morgan County, Georgia, Andrews's home. The novel spans nearly thirty years in the history of a small town and in the lives of its denizens, both black and white. The tale is at times comic, at times violent, but is always imbued with Andrews's characteristic knack for storytelling. Upon being queried about the lack of a political statement in the book, Andrews responded that he was not interested in preaching, that he was telling a story.

Andrews, himself the product of mixed marriages and relationships, recognized the conflicts and tensions that existed between races, and recognized the possibility that one race might seem to have the upper hand at certain times, but he chose to focus instead on the inherent humanity in all people, and thus on their similarities rather than their differences. Consequently, inAppalachee Red, as in the two other books in the Muskhogean trilogy, blacks and whites and Native Americans mingle, marry, and do business together, sometimes with felicitous results, sometimes with disastrous results.

Men and women also find their own voices through Andrews's exuberant prose; indeed, Andrews remarked that Appalachee Red was not about Red, but about Baby Sweet, the woman whom he saves from the clutches of an evil white policeman named Boots. Andrews further commented that Baby Sweet's, named for the brothel that Baby Sweet opens on the premises of her house after the mysterious departure of Red, is in fact about Lea; Lea is the product of a racially mixed relationship and has chosen to work for the brothel in order to provide services for the black men of the community.

Andrews's female characters are neither oppressors nor oppressed. They are not marginalized females, dependent only on a man's largesse. The difficulties of being a black woman involved with a white man are, in Andrews's novels, fodder for his utter delight with humanity. Many of the strongest, most memorable characters in the novels are women. The characters, both men and women, are not drawn as mere cardboard figures to be revered for their nobility or pitied for their victimization. Everyone, particularly the women, is given her own sense of power within the context of the situation.

Andrews's characters are quintessentially human— people making decisions as best they can, based on their individual conditions. These are real people, living their lives with no apologies, following the dictates of their hearts. If they from time to time appear to make bad choices, the reader must remember that they are given choices, not simply forced into situations for the purpose of a political agenda.

The Last Radio Baby, Andrews's memoir, is a charming look at the vagaries of growing up in a large, talented family with little money. Eventually the family produced artists (including Benny Andrews, who illustrated all the books for his brother), writers, architects, and poets. The successes of Raymond Andrews and his parents, brothers, and sisters point out the importance to him of community.

Andrews died tragically by his own hand on 25 November 1991. His collected letters and assorted family memorabilia are available in a special collection at Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Andrews's novels and memoirs are a valuable addition to the world of contemporary African American literature; they provide a fresh, apolitical look at the world of the rural South and are notable for their vivacity of language and fascinating characterization.

Bibliography

• Melville Herskovitz, The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941.
• Addison Gayle, Jr., ed., Black Expression, 1969.
• Ladell Payne, Black Novelists and the Southern Literary Tradition, 1981.
• Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil, 1979.
• Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer, The Afro-American Novel since 1960, 1982.
• Charles East, ed., The New Writers of the South, 1987.
• Jeffrey J. Folks, “‘Trouble’ in Muskhogean County: The Social History of a Southern Community in the Fiction of Raymond Andrews,” Southern Literary Journal 30:2 (Spring 1998): 66–75

Freda R. Beaty