The van, the racking, the machine in the corner. Things you bought once, that lose value slowly, and that have to be written down in a defensible way every period.
That’s arithmetic nobody should be doing in a spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet is never the thing the accounts were actually posted from.
What you can do
- Keep an asset register: what you own, what it cost, when it went into service.
- Depreciate straight-line, declining-balance or sum-of-years, per asset.
- See the whole schedule period by period, with accumulated depreciation and net book value.
- Have depreciation posted for you, without anyone remembering to run it.
- Revalue an asset upward or impair it downward, with the remaining schedule rewritten.
- Dispose of an asset - sold, scrapped or written off - with the gain or loss calculated.
- Produce the movement schedule your auditor asks for, and take it away as a file.
- Group assets into categories that hold the accounts each posting goes to.
How it works in practice
Set up your categories first (Fixed Assets → Categories). A category groups similar assets - vehicles, IT equipment, fixtures - and holds the ledger accounts its postings use: depreciation expense, accumulated depreciation, the asset account itself, gain or loss on disposal, proceeds, and the two used for revaluation and impairment. You pick every one of them from your own chart of accounts. Nothing is hard-coded and no account numbers are invented on your behalf.
Register the asset (Fixed Assets → Asset Register). Code, name, category, cost, residual value, useful life in months, and the date it went into service. It stays a draft while you check it over.
Activate it, and the schedule appears. Activating generates every period at once: the charge, the accumulated total, and the net book value at each point. Whichever method you chose, the schedule sums to exactly cost minus residual value, with the final period absorbing the rounding, so an asset can never depreciate to an odd few cents above or below where it should end.
Depreciation posts itself. Due periods are posted automatically, and you can run it by hand from an asset when you want to close a period early. It’s safe to run twice, because a period posts at most once, so nobody has to remember whether it was done.
Revalue when the carrying value is wrong. Set the new value and it’s posted the right way round - upward to a revaluation reserve, downward as an impairment loss - then the remaining scheduled periods are rewritten from the new basis. Accumulated depreciation carries on without a gap, and the asset keeps its revaluation history.
Dispose properly. Record the sale, scrap or write-off with any proceeds, and the gain or loss against net book value is worked out and posted as one balanced entry. The remaining schedule is cancelled. After a revaluation, the gain or loss measures against the revalued basis, which is the answer that ties back to the books.
Give the auditor the schedule (Fixed Assets → Asset Schedule). For any period, by category: opening cost, additions, revaluations, disposals and closing cost; opening accumulated depreciation, the charge, what was released on disposal, and the closing figure; and the net book value, with subtotals and a grand total. Export it. It ties to the general ledger by construction, because every figure in it comes from the same posted rows.
Good to know
- You’ll need the Fixed Assets extension switched on (Settings → Extensions), and its permissions start at deny.
- A category with missing accounts records the asset but skips the journal. Depreciation is still calculated and the schedule still exists, and only the posting waits. That’s better than guessing at an account, but it does mean a half-configured category stays quietly silent, so check your first posting rather than assuming it happened.
- Assets are entered by hand, not raised from a purchase invoice. Buying the van and capitalising the van are two separate steps today. If you buy assets often, that’s real double entry to plan for.
- The schedule is a table. There’s no depreciation forecast chart or valuation dashboard. The numbers are all there, on screen and in the export.
- Only draft assets can be edited freely. Once an asset is active its schedule exists and is being posted, so a genuine change of estimate is a revaluation rather than an edit. That’s also what your accountant expects to see.
- Depreciation runs whether or not anyone signs in. For a company that only opens the system quarterly, the books still move monthly.