Fixed asset register: what to record and how to keep it true

A fixed asset register is the record of the things your business owns and uses over years rather than consumes in months: vehicles, machinery, computers, furniture, fit-out. It exists for three readers — your accountant, who needs the depreciation; your insurer, who needs to know what to cover; and you, who needs to know what you have and where it is.

The distinction that trips people up is between a fixed asset and stock. Stock is what you sell; fixed assets are what you use to run the business. They are accounted for differently, and mixing them in one list produces a register nobody can reconcile.

What a fixed asset register records

• A unique asset number, physically labelled on the item where practical. Without it, two identical laptops are indistinguishable in the record.
• Description, make, model, and serial number — the serial is what insurers and police actually ask for.
• Purchase date, supplier, invoice reference, and cost excluding recoverable tax.
• Category, matching the categories your accountant depreciates by rather than invented per item.
• Depreciation method, rate and useful life, applied consistently within a category.
• Accumulated depreciation and current net book value — the number that feeds your accounts.
• Location and the person responsible. This is the field that makes the register useful to you rather than only to the accountant.
• Condition and any maintenance or warranty dates, if the asset is one that gets serviced.
• Disposal: date, method, proceeds — and the resulting gain or loss, which has to reach the accounts.

Set a capitalisation threshold and write it down: below it, purchases are expensed; above it, they enter the register. Without a threshold you either capitalise keyboards or expense a machine, and both cause problems at year end. Your accountant will have a figure in mind, and tax rules in your jurisdiction may set one.

Building and maintaining it

1. Start from your accounts: every capital purchase above the threshold in the last few years is already in your books, and that list is a better starting point than memory.
2. Walk the premises and physically match items to the list. The first count always finds assets that were sold, scrapped or taken home years ago.
3. Label what you can with the asset number, so the next count is an hour rather than a day.
4. Agree categories, methods and rates with your accountant once, and apply them without exception.
5. Record additions at the point of purchase, not at year end. Retrospective entry is how serial numbers and invoice references go missing.
6. Record disposals immediately, including scrapped items. Ghost assets — things in the register that no longer exist — inflate your balance sheet and your insurance premium.
7. Do a physical verification annually, and reconcile the register total to the fixed asset figure in your accounts. If those two numbers disagree, one of them is being ignored.
8. Keep purchase invoices with the register entry for as long as your retention rules require.

A table, not a spreadsheet of tabs

Most small businesses run this in a spreadsheet and it works — until the register grows past a few hundred rows, or two people edit it, or you want to see all assets at one site without filtering by hand. The shape the data actually wants is a table with typed fields, related to a categories table and a locations table, with saved views for the questions you ask repeatedly: assets by site, assets fully depreciated, assets due for verification.

Ettex Records fits that shape: custom tables with typed fields and no code, relations between tables so category and location are references rather than retyped strings, grid, kanban and gallery views, saved views with their own filters and ordering, formulas and rollups across related rows, revision history where every cell change is tracked and restorable, row comments for queries, and CSV import to turn an existing spreadsheet into a structure in one step. If you would rather keep depreciation in a sheet, Ettex Sheets imports XLSX with formulas intact, and the capitalisation policy itself belongs in Ettex Docs.

Plainly: Ettex does not calculate depreciation for you, has no asset module, does not scan barcodes or QR codes, and does not post journals into your accounts. It gives you a well-structured table with history and views. The depreciation formulas are yours to write — which is fine for a register of a few hundred assets, and not what you want if you are managing thousands across sites.

Why registers stop being true

• Disposals never recorded, leaving ghost assets that inflate the balance sheet and the insurance premium.
• No asset numbers, so a physical count cannot be matched to the record.
• Depreciation rates chosen per item rather than per category, which makes the totals indefensible.
• Stock and fixed assets in one list, so neither reconciles.
• Location and responsible person left blank, which turns any question about where something is into a search.
• No annual verification, after which the register is a historical document rather than a record.
• The register total never reconciled to the accounts, which is how the two quietly diverge for years.

A fixed asset register is only worth what its accuracy is worth. Set a threshold, number and label the items, record disposals the day they happen, verify once a year, and reconcile to the accounts — everything else is data entry.