Fixed Asset Register UAE: What It Must Contain and How to Keep It

A fixed asset register is the schedule of everything your company owns and depreciates — laptops, furniture, fit-out, vehicles, machinery — with what each cost, when it was bought, how it is being written down, and what is left on the books today.

Before corporate tax it was good practice. Now it is evidence. UAE corporate tax is charged on accounting profit subject to adjustments, and depreciation is one of the expenses reducing that profit. If you deduct depreciation, you are asserting a number that has to be supportable. The register is what supports it.

The practical trigger is simple: the moment you claim depreciation in a corporate tax return, you need to be able to show where the figure came from — asset by asset. A spreadsheet nobody has updated since the assets were bought will not survive that question.

There is no prescribed UAE template, so the standard comes from what you need to defend the number and what an auditor will ask for. Each asset should carry:

Cost is not always the invoice. Delivery, installation, and anything else needed to get the asset working normally form part of the capitalised cost. Ongoing costs — maintenance, consumables, insurance — do not; they are expenses in the period.

The first policy decision is the threshold: below what value do you simply expense an item rather than adding it to the register? A UAE company buying twenty AED 150 keyboards does not want twenty asset records depreciating over three years.

There is no statutory threshold in the UAE. It is an accounting policy you set, document, and then apply consistently. Two rules keep it defensible: the threshold should be immaterial relative to your results, and you should not flex it between years to move profit around. Write it down — a single line in your accounting policy stating the threshold and the treatment is enough, and it is the first thing to point at when the question comes up.

Apply it per item, not per invoice. One invoice for ten chairs is ten items against the threshold, not one purchase above it.

Depreciation should post on a schedule, not in a panic at year end. Monthly is the norm and it is what makes management accounts meaningful — a year-end catch-up entry distorts every month before it.

For the rate itself, the register carries the useful life and the method; the arithmetic follows from them. Under straight-line the annual rate is 100% divided by the useful life, which is where the commonly applied UAE figures come from — roughly 20%–33.3% for computer equipment, 20%–25% for vehicles, 10%–20% for furniture and fittings. Our guide to UAE depreciation rates by asset class covers the full picture, including why the UAE has no statutory rate table.

Two review points matter each year. Useful lives should be reassessed if something has clearly changed — a machine now running double shifts is not on its original life. And assets that are fully depreciated but still in use stay on the register at nil net book value; they do not disappear just because there is nothing left to write down.

This is where most registers drift from reality. An asset sold, scrapped, or stolen has to be removed, and the difference between proceeds and net book value is a gain or loss in the period.

• Disposal — sold or traded in. Proceeds above net book value give a gain; below, a loss. Both hit the profit and loss and therefore the corporate tax computation.
• Write-off — scrapped, lost, or obsolete with no proceeds. The remaining net book value is written off in full.

Keep the evidence with the entry: the sale invoice, the scrapping note, the insurance claim. A disposal with no supporting document is the kind of adjustment that invites the next question.

One VAT point worth knowing: selling a business asset is generally a taxable supply if you are VAT-registered, so the sale needs to go out on a proper tax invoice rather than as a bookkeeping adjustment.

Auditors work in both directions. From the register to the floor — pick a sample of recorded assets and confirm they exist and are in use. From the floor to the register — pick things they can see and confirm they are recorded. A register that only survives one direction is a register with ghost assets or unrecorded ones.

Beyond existence, the usual challenges are on useful lives that do not match reality (a three-year life on office furniture, a ten-year life on a laptop), on additions that should have been expensed, and on disposals never removed.

On retention: corporate tax law requires supporting records to be kept for seven years after the end of the relevant tax period (Federal Decree-Law No. 47 of 2022). For fixed assets that effectively means the register and the underlying invoices outlive the assets themselves — a laptop written down over three years still has records to keep for years after it is gone.

The failure mode is always the same: the register is built once, then diverges quietly. Purchases go straight to expenses, disposals never get recorded, and by year end nobody can reconcile the schedule to the balance sheet.

Three habits prevent it. Capitalise at the point of purchase rather than in a year-end sweep. Post depreciation monthly. And reconcile the register total to the fixed asset balance in the ledger every month — if those two numbers agree, the register is alive.

In Maya Finance the register is part of the books rather than a spreadsheet beside them: assets are recorded with cost, useful life, and method; depreciation posts on schedule; disposals and write-offs compute the gain or loss and close the asset; and the schedule reconciles to the ledger. At year end the depreciation figure in the corporate tax computation traces back to individual assets without reconstruction.