Fixed assets register is for your company’s long term assets such as machinery, delivery vans and computers. These business assets would be categorized in your company accounts as fixed assets. Your company could claim capital allowances on them.
You would usually write off your fixed asset cost to your profit and loss account over the asset’s economic useful life. For example, machinery may have longer economic useful life than your computers in your office.The wear and tear process is called depreciation by accountants.
It is make sense to record all your limited company assets into one place. This is called fixed assets register.
Your company’s accountants would normally do physical verification of your company assets as part of their audit work to ensure the figure recorded in your company accounts are correct, for example, if your company has bought a laptop last year and the cost is booked in your company accounts and the laptop has been stolen, then the cost of the stolen laptop must be written off to your company profit and loss account and your fixed assets register must be updated.
What to record in your fixed assets register?
The following information should be recorded in your fixed assets register, for every asset bought for your company’s use.
- Date of your asset was purchased
- Your supplier details
- Description of your asset
- The cost of your asset
- Allocate unique reference number if your asset does not have its own serial number for easy identification by your accountants or your auditors.
- Date of your asset last revalued
- Amount of revaluation
- Economic useful life of your asset such as computer generally last for 3 years.
- Depreciation policy applied to your asset whether straight line method or reducing balance method is used.
- Accumulated depreciation amount charge to profit and loss account so far
- Net book value of your asset
- Date and value of your assets being disposed for cash, if any.
The net book value of your fixed asset is to be included in the company account under fixed assets heading. Further disclosure required in the notes to your company accounts is the breakdown of your fixed asset cost, depreciation charge for the year and net book value of the total fixed assets.