Furniture/Fixture Depreciation

This is the accumulated depreciation account for Furniture and Fixtures — a contra-asset account sitting alongside the original asset cost. It normally carries a credit balance, increased each year by the depreciation charge (posted as an expense to code 8002).

Real-world examples

Hospitality

A restaurant group charges £4,500 of depreciation against its dining furniture and fixtures at the year end — a debit of £4,500 to the depreciation charge code in Overheads & Depreciation and a credit of £4,500 to 0041 (Furniture/Fixture Depreciation). Given how often this kind of furniture is replaced, useful lives assumed here tend to be shorter than for office furniture elsewhere, producing a proportionally larger annual charge.

Professional services

A consultancy posts a much smaller depreciation charge — say £350 — against its office desks and chairs, which are expected to last far longer under normal office use. The entry is identical in structure (a debit to the depreciation charge code, a credit to 0041), but the useful-life assumption behind the figure, and therefore its size, differs substantially by how hard the furniture is actually used.

Commonly confused with

Code 0041 (Furniture/Fixture Depreciation) is easy to mix up with code 0040 (Furniture and Fixtures). Code 0041 is the accumulated depreciation — a contra-asset that only ever moves at the year-end depreciation run — while 0040 is the original asset cost, which only changes when an asset of that type is actually bought or sold. Posting to the wrong one understates the asset's net book value without anyone noticing until the next audit.

What a mis-posting here costs you

Posting furniture/fixture depreciation-related spend to the wrong Fixed Assets code doesn't change the total value of assets on the balance sheet, since it's still capitalised either way — but it does distort the fixed asset register and the depreciation schedule that runs off it, which is usually what alerts an accountant that something's misclassified at the year end.

Other codes in Fixed Assets