One aim of Informed Majority is to make the connection between community-level financial conditions and the long term health of their communities. Successful communities are the product of active civic engagement and participation of their residents. If you would like to learn more or become more involved, please visit our PROJECT UFO to learn more. When maintained in proper balanced, with assets equaling liabilities, such arrangements are referred to a fully-funded obligations or liabilities. In less technical terms, the AAL represents the amount that should already have been set aside in a prefunded-investment account to pay for future, post-retirement healthcare benefits based upon the employees existing record of past service.

@jcollum These conventions are also claimed to be in use in the US (see abbreviations.com). I have seen million, billion, and trillion abbreviated as M, B, and T respectively. However, I would not bet that that is a standard abbreviation. The “MM” was borrowed from Roman Numerals, though it does not follow the same conventions. Romans rarely needed very large numbers, so they never developed a consistent notation. The latter was hijacked by the financial industry as a way to denote “million” while the term “milliard” was still around (still officially used in the UK until ’74).

When not to use abbreviations

So if we stay consistent with the Greek abbreviations, then billion would be shown as a letter G . Think of your computer expressing bytes of memory as kilobyte, megabyte, or gigabyte. However, when it comes to billion, we don’t really see G or MMM as the abbreviation for billion. We are more likely to see a headline that reads the government spent $60B on a new project. B for billion isn’t Greek or Roman; it is just the first letter of the word billion. When preparing financial statements, accountants will typically write a note at the top of the income statement or the balance sheet saying, “All figures are expressed in millions of U.S. dollars,” for example.

• Under GASB 54, jurisdictions were required to begin recognizing and reporting their annual progress in meeting their projected liquidation schedule for converting this liability into a formal balance sheet entry.
• Otherwise, I can’t really find an answer as to why these two professions use different ways of of expressing “per thousand”.
• Developed a 91-lease database in Access for a 600k ft2 Class A office building.
• Led the application development team to successfully launch the application on time with 6+ constraints, while ensuring adherence to the highest level of quality standards and meeting customer requirements.
• If a financial statement has a lot of large figures, the accountant may simply dispense with abbreviations.
• Review a few examples of sentences that feature common abbreviations for million.

Apart from historical uses (e.g. clocks, classical dating), we should eliminate any roman numeral remnants from our thinking, now that we have adopted in 1963 I think the SI system / units. These abbreviations are also useful when writing articles in the paper. For example, articles discussing investments or stock market values often use shorthanded numbers to express large values. It would be unrealistic to use large numbers in headlines, but, with abbreviated numbers, the headlines can be easily written and therefore read. Otherwise, I can’t really find an answer as to why these two professions use different ways of of expressing “per thousand”. Trust me though — it makes a big difference when talking with various vendors for services.

When to Use the Abbreviation

Whether the topic is significant sums of money or a massive quantity of something, it’s what does mm mean to use abbreviations when writing out large numbers in text. Some abbreviations for million options may surprise you, as is also true for some of the other large number abbreviations. As stated above, MM is generally used in business to represent millions since the letter M by itself has historically meant 1,000. That said, if your organization uses M and it doesn’t cause confusion, you are free to use M to abbreviate one million. For example, within financial statements, the industry-standard abbreviation is M for a thousand, while in everyday life, the abbreviation of K for a thousand is usually the acceptable one. Therefore, discretion must be applied within every situation to accurately implement the acceptable abbreviation or comprehend the abbreviation you are reviewing.

Frequently, in finance and accounting settings now, an analyst will use k to denote thousands and a capitalized M to denote millions. Left unchecked, such mandates hold the potential to render many business models financially unsustainable. Taken to the extreme, over time, the cumulative effect of such initiatives could render an entire community, or even a nation, financially unsustainable. An unfunded mandate is perhaps best described as a government imposed requirement, restriction or regulation which results in additional direct or indirect costs for the employer or taxpayer.

Federal Financial Data

The Latin numeral MM is frequently used to designate that the units used in presenting information (financial and non-financial) are in millions. The example below shows how figures can be portrayed in millions.

To avoid confusion, use any and all abbreviations consistently throughout all your financial records. Roman numerals are often used in accounting to help abbreviate and designate numbers. For example, the Roman numeral MM is frequently used to designate that the units used in presenting information (financial and non-financial) in millions.

How was the mm abbreviation created?

The “future normal costs” would be those amounts that the employer “should be” setting aside in their current year’s expenditures for the benefits being earned during the current year. The problem with reporting in this manner is that the resulting numbers, to the casual observer, appear to be a thousand times smaller than in reality. In other words, $1,000 becomes $1 – or one million dollars becomes $100,000. The reference to “000’s omitted” is most often found in financial reports and refers to the practice of presenting tables of numbers presented in “thousands of dollars” (hence 000’s omitted). When business people read reports and recruiters read resumes, it’s common to see this — $1M. Millions are most commonly expressed with the leading letter, M.