QuickBooks 2011: The Missing Manual

Fixed Asset Items

Assets that you can’t convert to cash quickly—such as backhoes, buildings, and supercomputers—are called fixed assets. If you track information about your fixed assets in another program or have only a few fixed assets, there’s no reason to bother with the Fixed Asset Item List. As you can see in Figure 6-6, Fixed Asset items track info such as when you bought the asset and how much you paid. But in QuickBooks, you have to calculate depreciation (see the box on How Depreciation Works) for each asset at the end of the year and create journal entries to adjust the values in your asset accounts.

Figure 6-6. When you buy a fixed asset, you can create a Fixed Asset item and enter the asset’s name and purchase information, where you keep it, its serial number, and when the warranty expires. When you create a Fixed Asset item, QuickBooks doesn’t automatically add the purchase price to the asset account you choose. Instead, the account you choose in your purchase transaction (check or credit card charge, for instance) is what adds the purchase price to the Fixed Asset account in your chart of accounts.

When you sell an asset, open the Edit Item dialog box (choose Lists→Fixed Asset Item List, and then press Ctrl+E) and turn on the “Item is sold” checkbox. When you do that, the sales fields come to life so you can specify when you sold the asset, how much you sold it for, and ...