Читать книгу Corporate Finance For Dummies - Michael Taillard - Страница 89

The easiest type of depreciation to use is called straight-line depreciation. Straight-line depreciation is cumulative, meaning that if you report a value in depreciation for a piece of equipment one year, that same amount gets added to the next year’s depreciation, and so on, until you get rid of the equipment or its value drops to 0.For example, if you buy a piece of equipment for $100 and each year it has a depreciation of $25, then you’d report $25 of accumulated depreciation the first year and $50 of accumulated depreciation the next year, while PPE value would go from $100 the first year to $50 the next.

To calculate straight-line depreciation, all you do is start with the original purchase price of the equipment, subtract the amount you think you can sell it for as scrap, and then divide that number by the total number of years that you estimate the equipment will be functional. The answer you get is the amount of depreciation you need to apply each year. So a piece of equipment bought for $110 that lasts four years and can be sold as scrap for $10 has a depreciation of $25 each year.

A similar type of depreciation, called unit-of-production depreciation, replaces years of usage with an estimated total number of units that the equipment can produce over its lifetime. You calculate the depreciation each year by using the number of units produced that year.