I have taken over the bookeeping for a company where the previous person did not do the depreciation postings.
My question is can i retrospectively enter the asset charge to the balance sheet and then do the monthly postings from then until now.
As some of the assets where purchased in previous financial years, how would i deal with this - would i enter the value of the asset at the beginning of this financial year after previous years depreciation has been deducted?
Are you saying that there has never been any Depreciation posted for company assets?
If the company has an accountant who signs off the accounts and does their tax etc, then you may find that the final company accounts does show depreciation in the Balance Sheet.
Do you have, or can you get hold of a set of the previous years final accounts? . Speak to the Accountant if possible, as they may well have an Asset list showing what was purchased and when.
In order to do the depreciation correctly, you really need to know the value and date each asset was purchased, and what the dreciation policy is for each item or catoagory, only then can you calculate the depreciation properly.
If there has not been any depreication posted in earlier years, then that means the P&L will be overstated, and they may have paid too much tax - a whole new ball game!
There have never been any postings done on Sage, the accountant has details of all the assets and depreciation rates and whenever year end came around they did the necessary adjustments so the accounts are correct.
I'm just tryring to bring all the details in-house so to speak and have a record on sage to make our monthly figures more accurate and trying to decide how to do it retrospectively.
Can't help unfortunately but was just talking about this today. Why don't some accountants pass on year end adjustments? When I had a proper job (!) we always got a list of year end journals to post.
Would get details of opening balance adjustments in your current year so your opening balances agree to the signed accounts for last year.
Would also get the fixed asset register from the accountant so you can either maintain manually on say excel or input into SAGE so the depreciation can be included in SAGE going forward.
