Skills / Reconciliation and close, Tax

Depreciation and fixed asset tie-out

What it does

Rolls the fixed asset register forward — cost and accumulated depreciation, beginning through ending, in total and by asset class — and ties it to the depreciation schedule and the return.

Fixed assets accumulate errors quietly because the schedule is rarely rebuilt. It is rolled forward, year after year, often through a change of software or preparer, and each roll carries forward whatever was already wrong. Four failures account for most of what this finds: a disposed asset still depreciating, beginning accumulated depreciation that does not agree to the prior-year return, an asset depreciated past its cost, and additions never added — capital expenditure expensed or left in construction in progress.

None of these show up by reading the depreciation expense figure. They show up in a rollforward, which is where this starts.

What it proves

Seven tests, and no clean workpaper unless all of these hold:

  • The cost rollforward foots — beginning + additions − disposals = ending, in total and by class.
  • The accumulated depreciation rollforward foots — beginning + current-year expense − accumulated on disposals = ending.
  • Beginning balances equal prior-year ending balances, taken from the prior-year return or financial statements as filed — not from the software's current state of the file, which is what introduced the error in the first place.
  • Register totals agree to the return or trial balance for cost, accumulated depreciation, and current-year expense.
  • No asset has accumulated depreciation exceeding its depreciable basis.

Straight-line is recomputed exactly from the schedule's own inputs. For accelerated methods it tests internal consistency only and flags the rate for verification — it asserts no recovery period, MACRS percentage, bonus rate, or Section 179 limit. Book and tax registers are kept separate: reconciling a book register to a tax return produces a meaningless variance, because the difference is a deferred tax item rather than an error.

What you get

Seven tabs:

  1. Tie-Out Summary — the seven tests with amounts and differences, the verdict, and the figures requiring confirmation against current authority. The signable page.
  2. Rollforward — cost and accumulated depreciation, in total and by class, with the prior-year agreement shown.
  3. Asset Detail — every asset with recomputed depreciation, difference, net book value, and flags.
  4. Exceptions — every asset-level finding with the condition and the dollar effect where quantifiable.
  5. Additions — with in-service dates, method, life, and the note to verify recovery period and any bonus or Section 179 election against current instructions.
  6. Disposals — proceeds, cost, accumulated depreciation removed, net book value, recomputed gain or loss, and whether depreciation correctly stopped.
  7. Book vs Tax — the difference by class where both registers are supplied, which is the deferred tax input rather than an error.

Where it stops

It contains no statutory figures, by design — no recovery periods, no MACRS tables, no bonus percentages, no Section 179 limits. Those change, and a skill that hard-codes them is wrong on a schedule nobody controls. It recomputes what the schedule's own inputs imply and flags what needs checking against current instructions.

A retroactive life or method change, assets on the register that no longer physically exist, construction in progress carried for years, state decoupling on bonus and Section 179 — reported as facts, with the treatment question routed to the signer.