I suppose what is lost is a summary level measure of business exposure to any differences between book value and actual value. A business cost when individual assets are disposed off. It is however a rather crude measure, as old large items with a low true current value will obscure actual current business exposure.
If Book value was only shown on the summary page, users would need to click on the book value of each control account (Furniture, Land & Buildings, or Motor Vehicles) to see a screen similar to the current Fixed Assets tab, but showing the total asset value, total depreciation, and again total book value, together with the details for each individual asset. A useful management summary in my opinion but not conventional so I’m probably in the minority.
While Fixed Asset purchase price and Fixed Asset accumulated depreciation continue to be shown on the summary screen. I assume most users are creating a group for Fixed assets. So using the current software capabilities the cart of accounts would contain some thing like
Assets
- Current Assets (Manually created Group)
- Cash at bank
- Fixed Assets (Manually created Group showing total fixed assets book value)
- Furniture
- Land & Buildings
- Motor Vehicles
- Fixed assets, accumulated depreciation
Similarly if the program was enhanced to enable Fixed asset control accounts to have individual accumulated depreciation, the typical chart of accounts would probably be
Assets
- Current Assets (Manually created Group)
- Cash at bank
- Fixed Assets (Manually created Group showing total fixed assets book value)
- Furniture
- Furniture, accumulated depreciation
- Land & Buildings
- Land & Buildings, accumulated depreciation
- Motor Vehicles
- Motor Vehicles, accumulated depreciation
Or more usefully showing book value on the summary screen for each Fixed asset class:
Assets
- Current Assets (Manually created Group)
- Cash at bank
- Furniture (Manually created Group showing Furniture book value)
- Furniture
- Furniture, accumulated depreciation
- Land & Buildings (Manually created Group showing Land & Buildings book value)
- Land & Buildings
- Land & Buildings, accumulated depreciation
- Motor Vehicles (Manually created Group showing Motor Vehicles book value)
- Motor Vehicles
- Motor Vehicles, accumulated depreciation
And given that level of detail on the Balance Sheet side of the summary page, I agree the Profit and loss side would be better if “Fixed assets - Depreciation” and “Fixed assets - loss on disposal” was also split to match the control account definition (as suggested in the opening post).
So that would also be workable, just involves a greater screen space allocation on the Summary page.
Regardless of the summary page display, I would like to see totals displayed at the bottom of the page in the Fixed Assets tab (similar to the Bank Accounts, and Receipts & Payments tabs). Ideally also similar page displayed when drilling down on a Fixed asset control account but without native display of book value, it may have to be a sort or search function in the Fixed Assets tab.