The balance sheet is one of the key financial statements, displaying your company’s assets and liabilities. It also includes owner’s equity, which is money owed to the owners of your company.
Assets appear on the top of the balance sheet and are listed in descending order. Those that can be turned into cash quickly (current assets) are listed first.
Depreciation and Amortization
Depreciation is the process of lowering the value of an asset over time through scheduled charges to income. This method is used for both tangible and intangible assets.
A depreciation expense is a non-cash charge that is charged to the income statement each year. The expense reduces the value of a long-term asset recorded on the balance sheet until the cost of the asset is fully expensed or sold or replaced.
In most cases, a company uses the straight-line method for depreciation. This method allocates the full asset’s value evenly over its estimated useful life. This is the simplest depreciation method, but there are other methods that companies can use to better reflect the economic cost of their equipment.
For example, some companies will depreciate their vehicles over a five-year period. This means that if the company bought a car for $30,000, it would record a depreciation expense of $1,500 each year. This will reduce the asset’s value by that amount each year until it has no remaining value and it is disposed of.
This is considered a good practice, because it lowers the tax burden on the company and allows it to build up reserves for replacing its assets when they are no longer of use to the business. It also allows the company to track how much it is losing in value over time, and how it can plan for that loss.
Interest
Interest is a big part of most companies’ operations, and it makes sense that the best way to measure a company’s borrowing power is to track the amount it owes to its creditors. To do this, a company should create a debt schedule detailing each of its current and historical liabilities along with their balances and interest rates. While this can take time and money to implement, it’s worth it for the savvy investor who wants to know how much they stand to gain or lose when they lend out their hard earned cash.
Using this information, a business can make the best possible decision about how to go about paying back its borrowed monies. This can be done in a number of ways, from reducing interest payments on existing loans to renegotiating the terms of new ones. The best part is that the cost of these transactions are usually tax deductible to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single year, making them a win-win for both shareholders and creditors.
Also read: The Importance of Balance Sheet Reconciliation
This is one of the most complex accounting operations and requires some skill to master. The key to the task is understanding the complexities of the system so that you can accurately record and present all the pertinent data in an organized manner.
Taxes
A company’s balance sheet is a financial statement that shows the total of its assets and liabilities. It also tells the amount of shareholders’ equity. This is the money that the owners of the business are owed after all liabilities have been paid.
Assets include cash, accounts receivable and inventories. They also include long-term investments such as property, plant and equipment (PP&E). In most cases, these items are depreciated or amortized based on their use or value.
However, some types of assets are non-current and cannot be turned into cash quickly. They might be intellectual property, trademarks, copyrights or goodwill. These types of assets are typically included in the section of the balance sheet titled “non-current assets” instead of being listed under short-term assets.
For example, money that a company receives for future services or shipments of goods is reported as deferred revenue on the balance sheet. This includes sales taxes not yet remitted to the government, as well as money received for gift cards that have not been redeemed as of the balance sheet date.
Liabilities include short-term debts and long-term loans that will come due within one year of the balance sheet date. Typical examples of current liabilities are accounts payable to vendors, interest payments on short-term borrowings and the latest portion of the company’s longer-term loan obligations.
Other Expenses
Other expenses are the other side of the coin to depreciation. They appear in the section of the balance sheet, which shows what your company owns and owes. These can include one-time purchases like a new truck, or long-term costs that add to the value of your business.
Expenses can be big or small, and many are tax-deductible, meaning that you pay less in taxes. For example, if your company makes wood chairs and you buy the lumber from an online retailer, you can write off that cost on your tax return.
Another type of expense is called a capital expenditure. It’s a purchase that adds long-term value to your business, such as a new building for your printers or a machine that will allow you to produce more products.
This type of expense is treated differently from other types of expenses, such as advertising, because it adds to the long-term value of your business. In fact, a print shop that spends $7,500 to purchase a new cotton candy machine would have a much higher profit on its income statement than it would have if it had just reduced the amount of cash on its balance sheet by the same amount.