Fixed assets may represent a significant area in many organizations. This article provides a list of fixed best practices.

General ledger may not be able to maintain all individual transactions of a company. This is especially true in large organizations where there may be thousands of transactions each day. In such cases, subsidiary ledgers and special journals are used. In this article, we will discuss the most common types of subsidiary ledgers.

The article below discusses how to distinguish property, plant and equipment from inventory, provides key controls for purchasing inventory purchasing and underlines some peculiarities of capital acquisitions.

Valuation of fixed assets has always been a contradictory issue for standards setters. Accounting for fixed assets at historical costs decreases the likelihood of manipulation, while accounting for fixed assets at fair values provides more relevant information to users of financial statements. In this article we will review US GAAP rules about initial measurement and subsequent accounting for fixed assets, and compare them with the IFRS requirements.

These days companies manufacture a lot of product varieties. Each product requires multiple parts to be created. Manufacturers can produce such parts themselves or they can buy them. Of course, the choice of producing parts or buying them includes various aspects and one of them is cost. In this article, we will discuss make or buy decisions.

Most costs capitalized to manufactured or constructed assets are easy to differentiate from costs that should be immediately expensed. In this article, however, we’ll cover a more obscure cost that should be allocated to constructed fixed assets – interest on the debt used to finance the construction project.

Most businesses use fixed assets which are typically depreciated. Such depreciation can be classified as direct or indirect expense. How can one distinguish between the two? In this article we will discuss this question and provide examples.

Depreciation might sound simple in theory - the company buys a fixed asset and then writes off the cost over a period of time. But what if a company has hundreds or thousands of depreciable assets, each with its own cost, salvage value, and useful life? What if a particular machine has several dozen separate parts that must be replaced at different times? Situations like this call for specialized methods of depreciation.

Fixed assets aren’t always ready for intended use as soon as they are purchased. There may be some activities which need to be completed before assets become ready for use. Can fixed assets be depreciated before they are ready for use? Can fixed assets go without being depreciation while they are not in use after pre-operating periods have ended? These questions will be answered in this article.

Numerous suppliers (e.g., in the automotive industry) work with their customers to design and develop products or molds, dies, and other tools to manufacture such products. These costs may be called preproduction costs related to long-term supply arrangements. Under these arrangements, customers sometimes reimburse suppliers for the incurred costs. In this article, we will discuss accounting for such costs.