A new accounting rule helped electric car maker Tesla Inc. to post a first-quarter revenue beat, and the company also used the change to book a stealth adjustment to its running total of accumulated losses.

Tesla reported revenues of $3.4 billion compared with analyst expectations of revenues of $3.2 billion, up from $2.7 billion a year ago.

However, Tesla TSLA, -9.81% also took advantage of the new rules to revise the estimate in its first-quarter filing of the impact of the new rules on its accumulated deficit for prior years.

Tesla has an accumulated deficit, instead of retained earnings, because it has booked losses for years. In its annual report released in February the company said it would be able to reduce its accumulated deficit by $520 million pretax at the beginning of 2018, as a result of the new revenue recognition accounting rules that allow the company to post revenue from leased cars much faster.

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The new revenue recognition rules, adopted as of Jan. 1, impact the way the company accounts for vehicle sales. Sales with a resale value guarantee and cars leased through its leasing partners would now generally qualify to be accounted for as sales with a right of return, rather than operating leases, accelerating the recording of revenue for Tesla.

But last week Tesla reported a final adjustment of $623 million, from a range of $520 to $570 million reported in its annual report. The company reported a record loss of nearly $785 million for the first quarter, bringing its total losses to more than $5 billion. But that number would have been even worse without the change to the adjustment.

A Tesla spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Olga Usvyatsky, vice president of research for Audit Analytics, told MarketWatch that SEC disclosure rules don’t require the company to restate prior period results for the upward adjustment.

“SAB 74 only requires companies to provide a reasonable estimate of the expected impact of new accounting standards,” said Usvyatsky. “Once all the final numbers are disclosed by companies for first quarter, it will be interesting to see how they compare to the preliminary estimates that were made at year-end.”

Read:New rule forces big car makers into big changes in how they count revenues

Ford Motor Co. F, -0.88% completed its implementation of the new rules as of Jan. 1, 2017, with a non-material impact. General Motors Co. GM, -0.03% estimated a $1 billion negative impact from the rule change as of December 31, but also revised that number at the end of the first quarter to $1.133 billion.

All three companies implemented the new revenue standard using the “modified retrospective” method, which means they made a cumulative adjustment to the beginning balance of shareholder equity, or in Tesla’s case its accumulated deficit, in the year of adoption rather than recasting prior period results for comparability as some companies like GE and Microsoft have done.

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