depreciation and how to make balance sheet according to local government

[Duane Evenson]

张韡武 wrote:
> Dear all. I read the conception guide and chapters about depreciation.
> The guide suggested me to use following account hierarchy for
> depreciation:
>
>       * Assets
>               * Fixed Assets
>                       * Blade Server
>                               * Original Cost
>                               * Accumulated depreciation 
>                       * Color Laserjet
>                               * Original Cost
>                               * Accumulated depreciation
>       * Equity
>       * Expenses
>               * Depreciation
>
> And the generated balance sheet is according to this hierarchy too.
> However in our local tax office we were asked to fill balance sheet the
> fixed assets section in this way (our accounting period is per quarter)
>
> Total Origianl Cost at end of last quarter
>                                                              ￥59,783.70
> Total Accumulated depreciation at end of last quarter
>                                                              ￥16,482.18
> Total Net book value at end of last quarter
>                                                              ￥43,301.52
> Total Original Cost at end of this quarter
>                                                              ￥64,782.70
> Total Accumulated depreciation at end of this quarter
>                                                              ￥28,395.19
> Total Net book value at end of this quarter
>                                                              ￥36,387.51
>
> So in order to fill the tax forms, we have to do a lot of suming, sum up
> all Original costs and all Accumulated depreciation, manually. This is
> work I wish to avoid (we got dozens of fixed assets and do it 4 times a
> year). So, I wish to organize account hierarchy in this way: 
>
> Assets
>               * Fixed Assets
>                       * Original Cost
>                               * Blade Server
>                               * Color Laserjet
>                       * Accumulated depreciation 
>                               * Blade Server
>                               * Color Laserjet
>       * Equity
>       * Expenses
>               * Depreciation
>
> My question is: if I use this alternative hierarchy, does it have any
> other side-effect? I do this for getting a balance sheet according to
> tax office, but do I broke other feature or make other calculation more
> difficult at meantime? I am a new user anyway.
>
> Thanks a lot for hints and suggestions in advance!	
>
> For your information: in order to enter the balance sheet by the local
> tax office, we are REQUIRED to use Microsoft Internet Explorer because
> that form was made up with ActiveX (although Javascript certainly can do
> it as good), in other words, local tax office ASKs us to use Windows.
> Few people complains about it yet because of low adoption rate of both
> Firefox and Linux. I hate this but things would not change if I am the
> only one complains.
>
> Best regards
> Zhang Weiwu
>
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There's nothing REALLY wrong with this. Obviously, you need to sum these 
numbers in two dimensions, by category (Accumulated Depreciation, 
Original Cost). If you choose to do it your way, realize that if is 
going to be difficult to know just when the depreciated value of your 
blade server reaches zero.
If you don't mind a bit of initial work, you could make a custom report 
which automatically calculates the two net totals.
Until you get it running, you could cut and paste the information into a 
spreadsheet and let it do the math.
(ie.
F1    =IF(E1<0;E1;"")
G1    =IF(E1<0;"";E1)
)
Frankly, I'd probably just do the spreadsheet thing each quarter.