Fixed assets

Fixed assets is the register of what the school owns and what it is worth on the books — buildings, vehicles, computers, lab equipment, furniture, library stock.

The line between an asset and an expense is the capitalisation threshold, set in Finance settings. Spend above it becomes an asset that wears out over years; spend below it is an expense this month. Without a threshold every stapler becomes a fixed asset with a depreciation schedule, which helps nobody.

Register an asset with its category, cost, acquisition date, location and custodian. It gets a tag number, and buying it posts to the books automatically — no separate journal entry to remember.

You choose the depreciation method per asset, not per category. This is deliberate: the same category legitimately holds items that wear out differently. A delivery van and a principal's car are both vehicles and do not decline the same way.

Attachments are optional and unlimited — invoices, warranty documents, photographs.

Ilmora keeps book and tax depreciation separately, and they will not agree. That is correct, not a bug.

Book depreciation follows the method you chose for each asset — your judgement about how that item actually loses value.

Tax depreciation follows the Third Schedule, which is law and not a choice: buildings 10%, plant, machinery, vehicles and furniture 15%, computers 30%, with the §23 initial allowance where it applies. Land is never depreciated on either basis.

Both are reports: book and tax. Keeping them apart is what lets you file a correct return and still show a sensible book value.

A register nobody checks becomes fiction. Open a verification round on the Verification tab, then record tags as you find them. Four outcomes:

• found — where the register said it would be
• moved — found somewhere else, and the register is updated, because the building is right and the record was wrong
• missing — assigned when the round closes to anything never scanned
• unregistered — something exists that the register has never heard of, which is usually the most valuable finding of the whole exercise

Missing is a finding, not a deletion. The asset stays on the books and keeps depreciating until somebody writes it off deliberately, because losing an asset is an accounting event with a loss attached.

In the browser you type tags or use a handheld barcode scanner, which types the tag and presses Enter by itself. Camera scanning is in the staff app, which is where someone walking a building actually is. Evidence photographs attach to the round.

Verification work is assigned through the existing inspections module, so it appears in the same assigned-task list as every other inspection.

Selling, scrapping or writing off an asset removes it from the register and posts the gain or loss — sold above written-down value is a profit that belongs in the P&L; below it is a loss someone may need to explain. Disposals lists them.

Revaluation exists for the case book value no longer means anything — a fifteen-year-old building at near-zero written-down value is not a building worth nothing. A surplus goes to equity, a deficit through the P&L.

Register vs control accounts answers the question that matters: does the register still equal the ledger? Each check names its own difference and the likely cause. A register that has drifted from the books is worse than no register, because it is believed.