How to create a fixed asset and its opening balanceكيفية إنشاء أصل ثابت ورصيده الافتتاحي

Fixed assets: the register, and the three things you do to an asset covers the register, the depreciation run, disposal and sale - everything that happens once an asset already exists. This guide is the step before all of that: opening the asset's own card, and giving it a starting balance if the business already owned it before it started using Libra.

1. Pair the account with its depreciation account, first

An asset account does not stand alone. Before you open the asset itself, its chart account needs a partner account to carry the depreciation, tied to it through Mapped to (see §8 of How to open an account). On a Lebanese chart the two are numbered to mirror each other: an asset account under class 22 and its accumulated-depreciation account under the matching branch of class 28 - a car account 2251 is mapped to 28251, the next car account 2252 to 28252, and so on down the branch.

Open the asset account and fill its Mapped to with the matching class-28 account before you go any further. Skip this and Libra will not stop you here - it stops you when you try to save the asset itself, in §4 below.

2. Open a new asset and fill in what identifies it

From the left menu, open Fixed assets › Fixed assets, then click New.

• Id is not yours to fill in - Libra assigns it on save, and §4 explains what that number turns out to be.
• Date defaults to today.
• Name is what you will recognise the asset by afterwards.
• Accounts is the class-22 account from §1 - type into it to search, the same way you search the chart of accounts elsewhere. The moment you pick one, the unlabelled box beside it fills with that account's own currency. This is the one thing on the card you cannot change once it is saved - pick the right account, in the right currency, now.
• Title, Source and Categories are extra identifying fields, free for you to fill in however your own records need them.
• Closed and Monthly depreciation are checkboxes - leave Monthly depreciation clear if your own routine is to depreciate once, at year-end, rather than every month (see §7 below).
• Owner is a free text field for whoever is responsible for the asset.

3. Effective date, residual value and depreciation rate

• Effective date is when depreciation starts counting - it is not the purchase date. Two conventions are both fine: from the day you bought it, or from the day it actually went into service (furniture bought and warehoused for a year before use is the case where the two dates genuinely differ). It can sit in an earlier year than the one you are working in - the card in the picture is dated 01-05-2025 in a company working in 2026, which is the normal case for an asset the business already owned.
• Residual value is the floor value where depreciation stops for this asset. Leave it at zero if your practice is to depreciate all the way down.
• Depreciation rate is the annual percentage. Libra does not supply or check this figure - it comes from the published rate table for that class of asset, and you type in whatever the table says (cars in the frame above are rated at 20.000).

4. Save - and what a missing pairing looks like

Click Save. If the account you chose in §2 already has its Mapped to partner filled in, the card saves and is given its own Id - 220001 in the frame below. That Id is simultaneously an auxiliary account Libra creates for the asset automatically, in the same family the auxiliary screen uses for clients, suppliers and banks (see §7 of The Auxiliary Accounts screen) - assets start their own family at 220001. Keep that number in mind; it is what you pick under PID in the next step.

If the account has no Mapped to partner yet, Save answers with this instead:

Go back to §1, open the account itself and fill Mapped to - then return and save the asset again.

5. The opening entry, for an asset you already own

If the business already owned this asset before it started using Libra, its starting figures go in through an Opening Voucher, not an ordinary journal voucher - read Opening vouchers first for what makes that screen different. Open Opening Vouchers › New and enter:

• one line on the asset's own account (2251 here), PID set to the auxiliary record the asset created for itself in §4, Debit = the asset's initial value;
• one line on its mapped depreciation account (28251), the same PID, Credit = the depreciation already taken as of the day you are opening the books;
• a third line balancing the two, on whichever opening or equity account the lookup offers - the same balancing role §3 of Opening vouchers describes as capital and accumulated profit.

In the frame above the difference between the two - 7,000,000 - is what the third line carries, and it is exactly the figure §6 shows coming back as the asset's own Book value.

An asset bought after go-live is different and simpler: it arrives on an ordinary purchase invoice that debits the class-22 account alone, carrying the supplier's own PID rather than the asset's - the class-28 side is only ever touched by an opening voucher or a depreciation run, never by a purchase.

6. What the card shows afterwards

Reopen the asset once the opening voucher above is saved, and the Information panel that read all zeros in §2 now carries what you posted: Initial value, Acc. deprec., Book value, Depreciation expense and Current value all fill in from the two lines you entered. That is your confirmation the opening entry landed on the right asset.

If several parts of the business share one asset - a delivery van, a building - split the monthly charge between them on Allocate depreciations to cost centers, rather than trying to fill Projects, Sections and Operations on the card itself.

7. At year-end

The Fixed asset depreciation and Closing fixed assets steps in end-of-year closing each carry their own Manual option, for booking the figures yourself instead of letting Libra calculate them - see Locking a period and closing the year for the rest of that screen.