You don't book LTV as receivables for accounting purposes, but you can plan consequential features of the business around it, like e.g. customer acquisition cos

You don't book LTV as receivables for accounting purposes, but you can plan consequential features of the business around it, like e.g. customer acquisition costs or future hiring plans. e.g. Hypothetically assume that Appointment Reminder is currently operating at a happy place for me but doesn't have room for an employee. If I onboard 20 new paying accounts, each at a monthly price of $200 and a predicted churn rate (based on existing data) of 5% monthly, my prediction is that the business added $80k in LTV this month. This is high enough to justify adding a full-time employee. The only place that will show on the books in the first month is as $4k of earned revenue, but we know the true state of the business is better than one would expect from just that data point. (The assumption in hiring a FTE, by the way, is that after one $80k month you continue to have other months that add at least around that much to LTV. Assuming that happens, and you can solve the cashflow issues in months 1 to 3, then you can certainly pay for that employee in an ongoing fashion.)