I had a fixed asset with an acquisition cost of £167,000 which was sold for £167,000.
I thought I had followed the guidance for disposals: posting a receipt to ‘Fixed assets, at cost’ and the assets sub-account of £167,000 and then recording the disposal in the Fixed Assets tab. I had expected these transactions to show on the Fixed Asset Summary Report with:
Opening balance of £167,000,
Consideration Received of (£167,000) and
nil Closing Balance.
However, the asset does not appear on the Fixed Asset Summary on/after the date of disposal, so there is nothing to show the consideration received for the fixed asset in the report.
Have I done something incorrectly and is this what would be expected?
Thank you in advance for your assistance with this.
You have done everything correctly, and this might be what you should expect, depending on the dates of transactions. Disposal of the asset removes it from the Fixed Assets Summary, but only if there are no relevant transactions during the period of the report.
This can be confusing to investigate, because what you see and posting options available depend on whether the asset is listed as disposed, dates of the receipt and disposal, whether any depreciation was previously applied to the asset, and dates covered by the report.
The bottom line is that, in time periods after all transactions, a disposed asset should no longer appear on the Fixed Assets Summary. For this reason, some users prefer not to dispose of assets. The Fixed Assets Summary is not a customary financial statement, so it really does not matter whether you have obsolete assets on it. Some like that, as it produces a history of asset ownership, depreciation, and sale.
One way to get a better understanding of this is to go to your History file and undo all the transactions related to sale and disposal of the asset. Then, enter them one at a time, producing a Fixed Asset Summary at each step. When you finally get to a time period where there are no longer any transactions relevant to the asset, it should be gone from the report.
If this information does not clear things up for you, please furnish more detailed information with screen shots.