Chart of Depreciation in SAP Overview

Chart of Depreciation in SAP: The chart of depreciation is a list of depreciation areas arranged according to business and legal requirements. The chart of depreciation enables you to manage all rules for the valuation of assets in a particular country.

You must assign a chart of depreciation to each company code that is defined in Asset Accounting. SAP provides country-specific charts of depreciation with predefined depreciation areas. These charts of depreciation serve only as a reference for creating your own charts of depreciation, and are therefore not directly accessible in the SAP system. When creating a chart of depreciation, you have to copy the reference chart of depreciation.

When you create a chart of depreciation, the system copies all of the depreciation areas in the reference chart of depreciation. You have to delete any depreciation areas that you do not need in your chart of depreciation. Depreciation areas that are not used can still be activated at a later point in time (after the production startup). A newly activated depreciation area can take over values from another depreciation area.

Picture Source : help.sap.com

Chart of Depreciation in SAP

SAP has provided chart of depreciation for various countries. Unfortunately forIndiait has not provided any chart of depreciation. Therefore we use German chart of depreciation.

Chart of Depreciation defines the various depreciation areas and valuation methods for assets. In SAP, they are defined for each country at client level and can be modified to suit the requirements.

The various features of chart of depreciation are as under:

1. The chart of depreciation is a directory of depreciation areas organized according to business management requirements.

2. The characteristics and significance of the individual depreciation area is defined in each chart of depreciation. A depreciation area is always assigned to only one chart of depreciation.

3. Depreciation keys for automatic calculation of depreciation are also defined in chart of depreciation. They are based on elements for calculation (calculation methods, period controls, and so on) that are available client-wide.

4. There are specific objects in the chart of depreciation for special calculations of asset values

Each company code is assigned to on chart of depreciation.

Chart of depreciation is nothing but a chart containing difference areas of deprecations like Book depreciation, Tax depreciation, consolidated depreciation, etc. Because we have to prepare our statements as per Indian Companies Act (Book depreciation), Income Tax Act (Tax depreciation)like that…Like in Chart of accounts … there we have list of GL accounts in COA whereas we have list of depreciation areas in Chart of Depreciation.

Master Depreciation Area:

The master depreciation area (area 01) has a special significance. This area is generally the area for balance sheet values. This master area is subject to the following restrictions:

1), The values of this area are always automatically posted to Financial Accounting.

2), During the legacy data transfer, you must always enter values in this area first.

3), It is not possible for the master area to adopt values or depreciation terms from other depreciation areas.

4), The currency of this area must always match the currency of the its company code.

5), You cannot delete the master area.

 Also See: Sample account assignment in G/L account