Product Tips
Handle Depreciation between Tax Programs and Intuit QuickBooks Accounting SoftwareBy: Char Eleene Mason, CPA, Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor®
|
|
Editor's Note: Good Tips and Timing
This tip came to us just as we started shipping QuickBooks Premier Accountant 2009. The 2009 product has its own tools to help with depreciation issues. (See note below.) However, we thought that many of you would still appreciate reading about this option and thank its author for such a practical tip.
Situation
Often at Year End, we are working to clean our QuickBooks® results to get ready for the transition to handling income taxes. One area that often requires attention is the depreciation of assets in the bookkeeping software.
Response
Especially if you do both the taxes and the books for your clients, you can also work back from the tax software to help you stay on top of depreciation within QuickBooks.
In Practice
For handling depreciation in QuickBooks when working back from tax preparation software, you can print out a depreciation schedule from Intuit Lacerte® or ProSeries® professional tax software.
Divide the annual depreciation by four, and make a memorized Journal Entry in QuickBooks for quarterly depreciation entries, so that the depreciation at Year End matches the tax program.
Moving Forward: Stay current with new depreciable assets. If your client buys new depreciable assets, you can add them to the prior year tax return, recalculate depreciation, and adjust the memorized Journal Entry as needed.
If You Don't Do Taxes
If you have a good working relationship with the practitioner or firm handling your client's income taxes,
you may still be able to work with them to get the depreciation amounts right for the memorized Journal Entry.
Editor's Note: Users of QuickBooks Premier Accounting 2009 have access to an internal Fixed Asset Manager to assist in calculating depreciation. Learn more about this feature here. If you are not already using the 2009 product, we hope you will consider it in the future.
Char Eleene Mano CPA, LLC is a full-service Certified Public Accounting firm based in Racine, Wisconsin and committed to the needs of its clients. We thank Char for the opportunity to use this tip. You can connect with Char or learn more about her firm at www.charmanocpa.com.
Char Eleene Mano CPA, LLC
4810 Northwestern Avenue
Racine, WI 53406-1504
P: 262.554.0321
F: 262.554.3268
Char@charmanocpa.com
Last Updated: 01/06/2009
