A laptop you bought for €2,160 is not an expense in the month you bought it. It is an asset that loses value over three years, and each of those months needs a depreciation entry. Financica keeps a register of your assets and posts those entries for you.
Fixed assets are available on the Scale and Professional Plus plans.
The register stores no amounts
This is worth knowing up front, because it explains how everything else behaves.
Financica does not store an asset's cost, its accumulated depreciation, or its book value. Those three numbers are read from your journal entries every time you open the register: the cost is the sum of the entry lines you attached to the asset, and the accumulated depreciation is the sum of the depreciation lines. The asset record itself holds only the policy -- the useful life, the method, the date it entered service.
The practical consequence: the register and your trial balance cannot disagree. If you post a depreciation entry by hand, Financica sees it. If you delete one, Financica sees that too.
Registering an asset
Go to Fixed assets in the sidebar and click New asset. Three fields do the work:
- Name -- what it is.
- Category -- IT equipment, vehicles, buildings, and so on. The category decides which accounts the asset uses.
- In service from -- the date depreciation starts.
Financica fills in the useful life, method, and first-year convention from your country's rules. For a Belgian company registering IT equipment, that is three years, straight-line, with the first year pro-rated by days. Open Advanced to change the life or set a residual value.
There is no cost field, because cost is a ledger fact. You attach it in the next step.
Attaching the purchase
Open the asset. If nothing is attached yet and there are unassigned lines on its cost account, an Attach the purchase card lists them. Tick the line that paid for this asset and click Attach selected. The asset's cost now shows that amount.
This is also how you bring in assets you already own. Attach the lines from your opening-balance entry and Financica picks up from wherever your previous books left off, with no import fields and no migration step.
How depreciation gets posted
On the first of each month, Financica works out what the schedule says your accumulated depreciation should be, compares it against what is actually on the books, and posts one entry for the difference. The entry is dated the last day of the month and covers every asset at once, with one pair of lines per asset:
- Debit the depreciation expense account (6302 for tangible assets on the Belgian chart)
- Credit the accumulated-depreciation account (the matching 2x9 account)
A few things follow from the compare-and-post design:
- Register an asset late and it catches up in one entry. An asset that entered service in January but was registered in April gets a single April entry for the four months, not four backdated ones.
- Post depreciation yourself and Financica leaves it alone. If your accountant already booked the month, the comparison finds nothing missing and nothing is posted.
- Book less than the schedule and Financica tops it up. The schedule follows the statutory rate, so a shortfall is treated as an omission. If you meant to depreciate more slowly, change the useful life instead: the schedule then re-anchors on the current book value over the remaining life, which is the correct treatment for a change in estimate.
- Book more and Financica stops. It never reverses an entry. It stays quiet until the schedule catches up with what you booked.
- Delete a generated entry in an open month and it comes back. The next run finds the same gap.
- The last entry lands exactly. Whatever it takes to bring accumulated depreciation to cost minus residual value, so rounding never leaves a cent behind.
You can also click Run depreciation on the register at any time. It only ever materializes months that have finished, so nothing is future-dated.
Choosing where the charge lands
Run depreciation offers two choices, and each one tells you the date the entry will carry:
- Up to last month is the ordinary cadence, the same thing the monthly run does. The entry is dated the end of the last completed month.
- Up to the last financial year end stops at the end of your previous financial year instead, and dates the entry there.
The second exists for the case where a year's depreciation was never booked and you only notice while closing the books. Running the ordinary way would sweep all of that year's arrears into the current month, putting a prior year's charge in the wrong exercise — and if you are about to file that year, in the wrong accounts. Running to the year end puts it where it belongs.
You can use both in turn. Run to the year end first, then run again the ordinary way: the second run reads what the first one booked and only posts the months since, so nothing is charged twice.
The choice disappears when the two dates are the same, which is the case for most of the year.
Undoing a run
Every entry the engine has posted is listed under Depreciation entries on the register, with an Undo beside it.
Undo deletes the entry. It does not post a reversal, because a reversal would leave two entries in the books to say what should have said nothing, and the next run would read the net and put the charge straight back anyway. Afterwards the books look as though the run never happened.
Two things it refuses:
- An entry it did not write. If you edited a depreciation entry, or merged something else into it, it is no longer the engine's to remove. Delete it from the transactions list instead.
- A closed period. That is the point of closing one. Reopen the period first.
Run depreciation again to put the charge back — but note where it comes back. The run posts into the period you pick, so undoing an entry from an earlier year and re-running the ordinary way moves that charge into the current period rather than restoring it where it was. If the entry belonged to your previous financial year, choose Up to the last financial year end and it goes back where it was. For a year older than that, use Remove from register below, which edits the entry in place instead.
Taking an asset off the register
Sometimes the register is simply wrong: something was capitalized that should have gone straight to expense. That is not a disposal, because the asset never left the business, so posting a disposal entry with a capital loss would misdescribe it.
Open the asset and click Remove from register. Nothing is booked. The asset's own depreciation is taken out of the entries it was posted to, leg by leg, so every other asset's charge stays exactly where it was — including in a year the engine can no longer post into. The entries on the asset's accounts stop being attributed to it and resurface as a fixed-asset balance no asset claims. From there you can recategorize the original purchase to the expense account it belonged on.
Two things it refuses: depreciation you booked by hand, which is yours to remove, and a closed period, which stays closed even though the removal itself posts nothing.
Closed periods
If a month is short of its schedule but you have already closed that period, Financica does not post into it. Correcting a filed period is an accounting judgment, so the register flags it with Needs review and tells you which period is affected. Reopen the period to let the engine catch up, or book the correction yourself.
See closing the books for how period close works.
Disposing of an asset
Open the asset and click Dispose. Enter the date, the sale proceeds (zero if you scrapped it), and where the money landed. Financica shows you the entry before posting it:
- Depreciation still owed up to the disposal date
- The cost, removed from the balance sheet
- The accumulated depreciation, removed with it
- The proceeds
- The difference, as a capital gain (763) or capital loss (663)
Nothing is posted until you confirm.
Things worth knowing
- Land is not depreciated. Pick the Land category and Financica registers it without a schedule.
- Belgian declining balance was abolished for companies in 2020. It is still available to sole traders, so the method is selectable, but the default for everyone is straight-line.
- There is no cost field to edit. Changing an asset's cost means posting a journal entry that changes it, which is what keeps the register and the ledger in agreement.
- A balance nobody claims gets flagged. If a fixed-asset account holds a balance that is not attached to any asset, the register says so. That balance is not being depreciated.
- Defaults for countries we have not researched are straight-line over a conservative life, pro-rated monthly. Check them against your own rules.