Fixed Assets
A fixed asset is something you buy to use for years — a machine, a vehicle, a laptop, software. Its cost does not belong to the month of purchase; it is written off over its useful life. neoo keeps the asset register inside the books: an asset is registered on the vendor bill that bought it, the depreciation entries are written at the same moment, and the register, the depreciation schedule and the Anlagespiegel are always in step with the ledger. There is no monthly “run depreciation” step.
Go to General Ledger → Fixed Assets (requires the fixed assets permission).
How an asset comes into the register
From a vendor bill (the normal way). Post a vendor transaction with a line on an asset account (1500–1790). The Fixed asset tab shows one card per line, not ticked: tick it, and the card is pre-filled from the account’s category — name from the line description, depreciation start on the invoice date, method, rate, useful life and residual value from the category. Proposed entries underneath show every depreciation entry the posting will write. When you post the bill, the asset gets the next number from the sequence and its schedule is booked. Edit the bill later and the asset follows (cost, date); untick the card and the asset and its entries are removed; delete the bill and they go with it.
Directly in the register. Add asset on the Fixed Assets page. Choose New asset for something already booked to an asset account by other means, or Existing asset (opening balance) when you migrate an asset table from a spreadsheet or another system: enter the original purchase date and cost, how much has already been depreciated and as of which date, and the schedule continues from that book value the month after. Nothing is posted for the past — it is already in your ledger. The useful life still counts from the original depreciation start, so the form shows how much of it is left after the opening date — check that line: a life that has already run out is refused, because it would write the whole book value off in the first month.
Import. Import on the Fixed Assets page takes a CSV or XLSX file with one row per asset (download the template from the dialog). The file is checked first; nothing is imported until every row is valid.
What gets booked
For each asset one linked ledger entry holds the whole schedule: one row pair per month-end, dated in the future, Dr depreciation expense (6820) / Cr the asset account. Reports at any month-end show the right book value; the income statement shows each month’s share. Categories can book indirectly instead — crediting an accumulated depreciation account (e.g. 1529) so the balance sheet keeps cost and depreciation visible.
These entries belong to the asset. They appear in the journal with a link to the asset and cannot be edited or deleted there; change the asset instead.
Depreciation settings
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Method | Straight line spreads cost less residual value evenly over the useful life (or at an annual rate on cost). Declining balance takes a rate on the book value every fiscal year — the Swiss tax rates (ESTV Merkblatt A/1995: 25 % furniture, 30 % machinery, 40 % vehicles, IT and software, 45 % tools) are the category defaults; with a useful life it switches to straight line as soon as that is higher, so the residual value is reached exactly at the end. Full depreciation at purchase writes everything off in the month of purchase (Sofortabschreibung). No depreciation registers an asset that is never written off (land, art). |
| Averaging method | Full month (default): every month from the month of the start date gets a full month’s share, whatever the day of purchase. Actual days: the first and last month are prorated by days. Full year: the fiscal year of purchase gets a whole year’s amount spread over its remaining months — the “volle Jahresabschreibung” most cantons accept. |
| Rate / Useful life | Straight line is defined by its useful life (in years or months). Declining balance needs the annual rate and takes an optional useful life. |
| Residual value | Where the book value stops. Tangible categories default to CHF 1 (the Erinnerungsfranken); software and intangibles to 0. |
| Depreciation start | Defaults to the invoice date; set it to the day the asset went into service if that was later. |
The register
- Register — every asset with cost, depreciation to date, book value, method and status. Search across name, number, serial number, category and account; Filters narrows by category, status, account, purchase year or method. Click a row for the detail.
- Schedule — what will be booked in each month of the fiscal year, by category or by asset.
- Anlagespiegel — the fixed-asset schedule your accountant asks for at year-end: per category, cost at the start of the year, additions, disposals and closing cost; accumulated depreciation, the year’s depreciation, impairments and closing balance; net book value at both ends. Prior year shows the comparison, Show assets the individual lines. Export it with the XL button.
- Disposals — sold and scrapped assets with proceeds and gain or loss.
The cards on top summarise cost, accumulated depreciation, book value, this fiscal year’s depreciation and the next twelve months.
The asset page
Every asset has its own page: the facts, the book-value curve, the full schedule by year (posted rows are ticked), the history of everything that happened to it, and the actions:
- Edit — name, serial number, warranty, notes, category. Assets added in the register can also change cost and dates while nothing has been booked.
- Change settings — a new method, rate, averaging or residual value effective from a date (the first of a month). The useful life is entered as the time remaining from that date (the dialog shows the current life and what is left, and the total it adds up to). Entries before that date stay exactly as booked; the plan continues from the book value at that date. This is how you depreciate more or less from a given year on. A plan that would write the asset off in a single month is flagged with a warning before you apply it.
- Remove a change — a settings change, adjustment, pause or resume entered by mistake can be removed from the History panel (the × next to its date); the schedule is recomputed as if it had never happened. Changes whose date lies in a closed period cannot be removed.
- Adjust — book an extra depreciation on a date (a year-end write-down, an impairment) or a write-up that reverses earlier depreciation. The adjustment is its own entry, visible in the Anlagespiegel under impairments; the remaining schedule is recomputed from the new book value.
- Pause / Resume — stop depreciating from a month (an asset in storage) and continue later; the remaining life is preserved.
- Dispose — record a sale, scrapping or transfer on a date. Depreciation is booked up to that date, the remaining entries are removed, and a disposal entry clears the asset: the book value comes off the asset account, the proceeds are set against the account they were booked to (the income account of the sales invoice you wrote, or the bank account), and the difference lands on the gain or loss account from Defaults. Undo disposal reverses it while the period is open.
- Delete — removes the asset and its entries (not possible once entries sit in a closed period).
Every dialog shows the resulting schedule before you confirm.
Closed periods
Nothing is ever written into a closed period. Entries already booked there stay; any change to an asset only regenerates the entries after the closing date, starting from the book value actually booked at that date.
Categories
System → Fixed Asset Categories (requires the fixed asset categories permission) holds the defaults per kind of asset: the asset accounts that belong to it, the depreciation expense account, direct or indirect booking, method, rate, life, averaging and residual value, and optionally whether a bill line on one of its accounts is pre-selected as an asset. Pre-selection is off by default; when switched on it applies from CHF 1'000 (many Swiss companies expense anything below that; set 0 to pre-select every line). neoo seeds the categories from the Swiss KMU chart with the ESTV rates; adjust them to your own practice.
Defaults
In Defaults: the Fixed Asset Number sequence, the Gain and Loss on Disposal accounts, and the Fixed Asset Start Date used as the default “as of” date for opening balances.