As opposed to personal finance where the goal is tracking personal worth, business is concerned with matching the expense of purchasing capital assets with the revenue generated by them. This is done through book depreciation. Businesses must also be concerned with local tax laws covering depreciation of assets.

This is known as tax depreciation. The small business valuation is free to choose whatever scheme it wants to record book depreciation, but the scheme used for tax depreciation is fixed. More often than not this results in differences between book and tax depreciation, but steps can be taken to reduce these differences.

Now, what purchases should be capitalized If you expect something that you purchase to help you earn income for more than just the current year, then it should be capitalized. This includes things like land, buildings, equipment, automobiles, and computers - as long as they are used for business purposes. It does not include items that would be considered inventory. So if you made a purchase with the intent to resell the item, it should not be capitalized.

In addition to the purchase of the asset itself, any costs associated with getting the asset into a condition so that you can use it should be capitalized. For example, if you buy a peice of equipment and it needs to be shipped from out of town, and then some electrical work needs to be done so you can plug the machine in, and some specialized training is needed so you know how to use the machine, all these costs would be included in the cost of the equipment.

You also need to know the estimated salvage value of the asset. Generally, this is assumed to be zero. The idea behind knowing the salvage value is that the asset will be depreciated untill the net book value (cost less depreciation) equals the salvage value. Then, when the asset is written off, you will not have a gain or loss resulting from the disposal of the asset.

Basic Concepts

Depreciation is the accounting method for expensing capital purchases over time. There are two reasons that you may want to record depreciation; you are doing bookkeeping for your own personal finances and would like to keep track of your net worth, or you are doing bookkeeping for a small busines and need to produce a financial statement from which you will prepare your tax return.

VALUING THE BUSINESS

Valuing the business is not as hard as you think, but you should never completely rely on a broker's or seller's estimate as to what a business is worth. Remember that buying a small business valuation is fundamentally an investment and consequently the business is worth only as much as its ability to generate profits for you based on how much money you must put into it. If you are going to work in the business as most people do, then the business should also pay you a fair wage in addition to the profits. The best way to determine a business's value is to work backwards from the available profits that a seller can prove.

So you're thinking about buying or selling an operating small business valuation. Well, don't do another thing before you read this article! Don't make the same mistakes that many others have made when buying a business and turn your dream into a financial and emotional nightmare!

I've been a business broker for many years and I've brokered the sale of hundreds of operating businesses and franchises. I'm always amazed at how much faith potential buyers put in the business broker and the seller. I'll tell you straight out, the business broker and seller are not on the buyer's side! Remember, for a broker, no deal -- no commission! So what can you do to avoid making possibly the biggest financial mistake of your life Get as much information as you can so that you'll know what to watch out for as you negotiate to buy a business. Here's some of the key things you should know about before buying an operating business.

Estimating Valuation

A central issue with depreciation is to determine how you will estimate the future value of the asset. Compared to the often uncertain estimates one has to do where appreciation of assets is concerned, we are on somewhat firmer ground here. Using sources listed below should make it fairly straight forward to estimate the future value of your depreciating assets.

* Tax Codes: For businesses that want to use depreciation for tax purposes, governments tend to set up precise rules as to how you are required to calculate depreciation. Consult your local tax codes, which should explicitly state how to estimate depreciation.

* Car Blue Book: For automobiles, it is easy to look up in references such as "Blue Books" estimates of what an automobile should be worth after some period of time in the future. From this you will be able to develop a model of the depreciation.

Account Setup

As with most accounting practices, there are a number of different ways to setup depreciation accounts. We will present here a general method which should be flexible enough to handle most situations. The first account you will need is an Asset Cost account (GnuCash account type "asset"), which is simply a place where you record the original purchase of the asset. Usually this purchase is accomplished by a transaction from your bank account. In order to keep track of the depreciation of the asset, you will need two depreciation accounts. The first is an Accumulated Depreciation account in which to collect the sum of all of the depreciation amounts, and will contain negative values. In GnuCash, this is an account type asset. The Accumulated Depreciation account is balanced by a Depreciation Expense account, in which all periodic depreciation expenses are recorded. In GnuCash, this is an account type expense.

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