Ross, you wrote:
>This is a question for American RP machine users.
>
>What are the typical years of depreciation does your company place on
>the RP machines you own? Accountants know how to get the best
>depreciation of typical capital expenditures, but RP machines are not
>typical, mostly because of their high cost and short technology life.
>For anyone who is interested, I will tabulate and post the results on
>the rp-ml.
>
>To the non-Americans on the list. This is a game we play to keep our
>hard earned money from paying salaries for interns at the White House.
>
>Ross Gates
>Select Manufacturing Services Inc.
>Muskegon, MI
>ross@selecteng.com
****************************************************************************
Ross:
For an SLA implementation study I did I used the Accelerated Cost Recovery
System (ACRS) to calculate depreciation based on a five-year property class.
This five-year property class encompasses "equipment used in research and
experimentation" which is how I classified the SLA machine for my company's
usage.
Two major advantages of ACRS depreciation are:
1) the computations are made using "property class lives" that are less
than the
"actual useful lives" and,
2) the salvage values are assumed to be zero.
You might even be able to use the three-year property class under "special
tools for the manufacture of finished plastic products" especially since in
three years the newer machines could be significantly improved and you may
want to sell the older machine and in this case you would have already fully
depreciated it.
Any recent Economic Analysis textbook should be able to help with examples
of this method and others.
Hope this helps,
Glenn G. Whiteside
E-mail: siderwhite@worldnet.att.net
For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/
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