Firm files patent on service contract and warranty accounting

Kerper Bowron LLC, an actuarial, accounting, and insurance consulting firm based in Birmingham, Alabama, and Irish Trinity LLC have filed U.S. and international patent applications for what they call Kerper-Bowron Method — a way to forecast and account for liabilities for service contracts and manufacturer warranties. 

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Partners John Kerper and Lee Bowron were named as inventors for the method, which they said Friday provides a contract-level probabilistic cash-flow forecasting approach for service contracts and manufacturer warranties. The intellectual property is held by Irish Trinity LLC. Bradley Arant  Boult Cummings LLP is serving as intellectual property counsel. The applications claim priority to an earlier U.S. provisional patent application filed in August 2025. 

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They said the method replaces traditional aggregate earning curves with month-by-month projections that align directly with the revenue recognition standard ASC 606, as well as other standards such as ASC 460, IAS 37 and IFRS 17.

They said the method would improve precision and auditability for revenue recognition and reserve estimation and enable new lending applications.

At the same time, the firm announced that a new paper extending the Kerper-Bowron Method to  manufacturer warranty accruals and collateralization applications has been submitted for peer  review. The paper builds on the authors' earlier work published in the journal Risks. 

A peer-reviewed paper on the method has been published in the journal Risks; and a new paper extending the method to manufacturer warranties and collateralization is now on SSRN.

"This filing and the concurrent submission of the new paper mark important steps in advancing and  protecting a method that brings contract-level precision to a large and complex market," said Bowron in a statement Friday. "By generating reliable monthly cash-flow projections for every  service contract and manufacturer warranty, the approach improves reserving accuracy and  creates new pathways for capital efficiency and risk transfer."


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Accounting Accounting standards Revenue recognition
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