[jerf]

There's more degrees of freedom in accounting and accounting-related matters that non-accountants tend to realize. An easy trick to explain is a big deal of some kind that is closing near the end of the quarter. If your customer doesn't care, you may be able to choose whether you close that deal this quarter, because you need the revenue this quarter, or if you want to close it next quarter because you've got this quarter's "beat" covered, and there's no great advantage to beating by just that bit more.

Obviously in this specific case, it's only a quarter's worth of flexibility; I mean this as an example, not a manual on the practice.

There's a lot of ways of borrowing against the future to show revenue now. It is suspicious, but it may not necessarily be suspicious in the "fraud" sense of they aren't making the money they claim to be making, but rather, are they eating their seed corn to get this quarter's beat? Did they pull revenue forward they "shouldn't" have? (Sometimes it seems like it's better to beat expectations by a little for several quarters, then have one big disaster quarter, than to miss by a little for several quarters.) Did they profit this quarter by failing to invest in growth that they're going to need later?

So, I wouldn't say it's an innocuous explanation exactly, but perhaps rather, there's a range of explanation that range from mostly innocuous gimmicks to the outright fraud, and it's hard to tell from the summary sheets which one you're looking at.