The Laptop That Becomes Thirty-Six Lines: Depreciation in the CRM

A laptop bought for the office is paid once, but it does not disappear from the profit statement in the same month. In the German books it becomes an asset: a useful life, a monthly depreciation amount, a book value that falls until only the residual is left. Three years of use means thirty-six monthly lines. Firmspace keeps two records for this purchase, and they are not the same record: the expense document with the receipt, and the asset card in Finance → Assets that produces the schedule.

Why the distinction matters: an expense reduces profit immediately; an investment is spread over its useful life. The code follows the German convention that depreciation starts in the month of acquisition, not the following month — even if the laptop arrives on the 28th, that month counts. The monthly amount is the depreciable base divided by the number of months; the base is cost minus residual value, never below zero. The last month absorbs the rounding remainder, so the sum of all rows equals the base exactly. Without that correction, a few cents would hang on the asset forever.

The receipt is where the story begins. Firmspace's expense extraction reads the document text and looks for German signals: “Investition”, “Anschaffung”, “Aktivierung”, “Anlagegut”, “Abschreibung”, “AfA”, “Nutzungsdauer”. A phrase like “Nutzungsdauer: 3 Jahre” becomes a proposed useful life of three years; “Restwert” or “Restbuchwert” followed by an amount becomes the residual value. The result is not a booking. It is a proposal with evidence lines and a confidence value per field, shown in the expense form for a person to check.

The confidence is deliberately uneven. An explicit word “Investition” lifts the booking kind to 0.85; a useful life taken from the text gets 0.6. That is not timidity. The useful life is an accounting judgement, and a wrong number changes every monthly line for years. The extraction can point at the sentence it used; it cannot decide whether the tax office accepts three years for this device. The person confirming the expense keeps that decision.

Here the assistant's own path is narrower than the form's. When the AI records an expense from a chat, the call carries vendor, amount, currency, category, date and a note. It does not carry the investment flag, the useful life or the residual. There is also no assistant tool that creates an asset card. So the assistant can capture the purchase and point you to the right screen, but it cannot silently turn a receipt into thirty-six depreciation rows. That is a deliberate stop, not a missing button.

The asset card lives under Finance → Assets and is a German-market feature: on an account outside Germany the API answers with a market error instead of pretending the screen exists. A card needs a name, an acquisition date, a cost, a useful life between 1 and 100 years, an optional residual value, an optional disposal date and a note. The list is capped at 500 assets; the schedule is opened per asset. The interface does not create the card from the expense, and the expense does not create the card from itself.

The arithmetic is plain, and that is the point. Cost minus residual gives the base. The base divided by the number of months gives the monthly amount, rounded to cents. The schedule starts in the acquisition month and runs for the chosen life. A three-year laptop produces 36 rows. If the division does not come out even, the final row is larger or smaller by the remainder, so the base is exhausted exactly. The book value in each row is the base minus everything written off so far, plus the residual.

Two dates bend the schedule. The acquisition month is included, following the German rule; there is no day-level proration, so a purchase on the 1st and a purchase on the 30th produce the same first month. A disposal date ends the schedule with the disposal month: the asset is still depreciated in the month it leaves, and not after it. If no disposal date is set, the schedule runs to the end of the useful life. The code returns an empty schedule when the life, the base or the date is missing — it does not guess.

The residual value is not a rounding leftover. It is the part of the cost that is never depreciated, and it stays in the book value at the end. That is why the same asset can show a positive book value after the last row: the residual is still there. The asset summary for a period adds three numbers: depreciation in the period, depreciation to date, and book value at the end. The period switch on the screen changes the range; the monthly rows themselves do not change with it.

Depreciation then lands in the reports as its own cost line. The income-surplus view (EÜR) adds “Abschreibungen (AfA)” next to cash expenses and supplier invoices; the BWA adds the same amount to the period's costs. That is the accounting reason for keeping the asset card separate: the money left the bank once, but the cost appears month by month. Deleting an asset removes its future and past rows from those reports, which is why the deletion is written to the audit log.

The limits are worth saying out loud. Only the straight-line method is implemented: the same amount every month, no declining balance, no units-of-production. There is no daily proration and no automatic useful-life table from a tax source. The card has a currency field, but the schedule is arithmetic on the amount, not a currency conversion. And none of this is tax advice: the useful life, the residual and the question whether an item must be capitalised at all belong to the accountant who signs the return.

So the right division of labour is unglamorous. The AI reads the receipt, proposes the booking kind and the useful life, and shows the sentence behind each proposal. A person confirms the expense, decides the life, and creates the asset card once. The CRM then does the part it is good at: thirty-six monthly rows, a last row that absorbs the cents, a book value that can be read on any date, and an AfA line that appears in the reports without being retyped. The laptop is paid once; the books see it for three years.