The depreciable things on a property, what they are worth now, and the monthly entry that puts depreciation on the books. Roofs, HVAC units, parking lots and the buildings themselves, each carrying its own cost, in-service date and life.
A description, the property it sits on, a category, what it cost, what it will be worth at the end, when it went into service and how long it lasts. Keyed by an asset number you assign.
Land does not depreciate, so a building bought for a million dollars is the improvements and nothing for the land. Splitting a purchase price between them is a judgment call, usually off the county assessor’s ratio, so it is a figure a person enters rather than one the product invents.
A roof paid for in November and finished in January depreciates from January. The two dates are different and the schedule runs off the right one.
An asset needs four: where its cost sits, where its accumulated depreciation sits, where the monthly expense goes, and where a gain or loss on disposal lands. They are entered once on the category rather than forty times on forty assets, which is how a register ends up with four different answers and a trial balance nobody can tie out.
A category carries the life a new asset starts with, and an asset that genuinely differs can set its own. An asset posting somewhere its category does not is the thing the category exists to prevent.
A manager scoped to three properties sees those three properties’ assets, on the register and in the totals.
A client bringing fifteen years of assets across already has the accumulated depreciation in their ledger, arriving with the GL Detail import. Say what each asset carries and through which month, and posting starts the month after rather than putting fifteen years through a second time.
Serial number, tag, the invoice or check it came in on, wherever it physically is. Free text, because every company tracks something different and none of it drives the arithmetic.
Straight line over a useful life, printed month by month with the accumulated total and the net book value on every row.
Half a month in the month an asset goes into service and half in the month after its life ends. 330 months is 27.5 years, the US residential rental life; 468 is 39 years for nonresidential.
A basis of 10,000 over 36 months is 277.777 a month, and taking 277.78 thirty-six times depreciates more than the asset cost. Every period but the last is the rounded figure and the last is whatever is left, so a schedule sums to the basis exactly by construction rather than by luck.
What it is expected to be worth at the end, zero for most things, subtracted before anything else. An asset worth more at the end than it cost has nothing to depreciate and gets an empty schedule rather than a negative one.
Accumulated depreciation and net book value are what they were at the end of a particular month, not for all time. Change the month and the figures move with it, which is what lets them tie to a balance sheet on the same date.
Cost, accumulated through that month, net book value and depreciation per month, for one property or the whole book.
Depreciation reaches both books monthly, one entry per property on each.
A property with forty assets posting individually would be 480 journal entries a year on each book, a general ledger nobody can read and a trial balance that crawls. One entry per property per month posts instead, and the register answers which asset contributed what to it.
What it comes to, property by property and asset by asset, before anything is written. Properties already posted and periods already closed are named there rather than discovered by the run failing.
A posted asset-month is what makes it safe: running month end again posts nothing the second time. An asset entered after its property’s month went through posts on its own rather than becoming unpostable forever.
Each property posts inside its own boundary. A closed period on the fortieth does not undo the thirty-nine that already posted, and a re-run picks up exactly where it stopped.
Depreciation reads like the pure accrual entry, and it isn’t one here. The asset’s cost reached both books through the bill that bought it, so a cash book that never depreciated would carry that asset at full cost for its whole life. Identical lines go to both, linked as a pair, and reversing either side reverses both.
Both figures sit on the asset. They differ whenever a monthly run is behind, which is how you see that it is, and a disposal catches up whatever the ledger is still owed.
Where asset systems usually get it wrong, so it is worth saying what happens.
Pick a disposal date and a figure for the proceeds, and the preview shows the cost, what has depreciated by that date, the net book value and the gain or loss. Nothing is committed until you say so.
The disposal catches up any depreciation the asset still owed, debits the accumulated depreciation back out, credits the cost away, and puts the difference against the proceeds as a gain or a loss. It’s one event, so it’s one entry, on both books like the monthly run.
Spreading it back over the months it belongs to would mean posting into closed periods, which is what closing a period is for. So only the disposal month has to be open, and the register keeps each month’s real period behind it.
Say which account the money went to and that is where it posts, so a bank account’s own code puts it in the checkbook register like any other receipt. The register shows that receipt once rather than twice, because the cash book’s side of the pair doesn’t write checkbook rows.
The schedule is recomputed with the disposal date rather than read to the end. An asset sold halfway through its life carries half a life of accumulated depreciation, not a full one.
The loss is whatever was left undepreciated. It is the same operation, with the proceeds at zero.
With its dates, the way a voided check stays. It cannot be deleted, and it cannot be edited either: its figures are what was reported, and changing them is a correction rather than an edit.
Straight line over a useful life, which is what an owner statement should show. MACRS with its conventions, section 179 and bonus depreciation is roughly as much work again and wants a tax person checking it rather than a developer, so it is not here and is not claimed. The schedule is shaped to take a second basis beside the first, so adding tax depreciation later is a new calculator rather than a rewrite of what has already been reported.