Depreciation

[carolh]

Do you depreciate your building and furniture and equipment? If you depreciate do you record depreciation monthly or what interval? We have a modular building for our church. How long should it be depreciated for? What is the time period to depreciate piano, organ, chairs and other furniture and equipment?

[Matt]

Depreciation is used by for-profit businesses to match revenue to the costs incurred to produce that revenue as accurately as possible. Since churches do not exist to make a profit there usually is little reason for a church to go to the trouble of calculating and recording depreciation. Generally speaking, assets (no matter what type they are) should be depreciated using the straight line method over the asset's expected useful life. You can review the tables of asset class lives in IRS publication 946 to see what the IRS considers to be the useful life for the different types of assets you have listed.