Your assignment
Role: Staff accountant supporting Beacon's controller and a finance manager reviewing Year 4 asset performance
Deliverable: A three-page Year 4 asset-review memo with three identified asset bridges, supported calculations, the vehicle sale entry, statement tracing, scope controls, and separate controller and finance-manager conclusions.
Evidence basis: fictional
Evaluation criteria
- technical accuracy (35%): Computes the $5,000 revised depreciation, $3,000 disposal gain, and $16,000 impairment loss from correctly labeled intermediate amounts.
- scope and evidence (25%): Uses the information timeline, sale scope, held-and-used asset-group boundary, and supplied-input limitations before applying each calculation.
- articulation and controls (20%): Prepares the complete sale entry and traces income, balance-sheet, cash-flow, and indirect-reconciliation effects without double counting.
- interpretation and communication (20%): Separates accounting conclusions from bounded finance questions and identifies concrete missing evidence without unsupported causal or quality claims.
Your role and decision
Beacon's controller needs to close three Year 4 asset matters. A finance manager will use the same memo to assess what the numbers suggest—and what they do not prove—about asset use, cash generation, and future capital needs.
Your decision is whether each proposed treatment is supported by the fictional packet and whether the three events can enter the review file without mixing their assets, dates, evidence, or statement effects.
The three matters
- The packaging press has $36,000 cost and $18,000 accumulated depreciation. New post-Year-3 evidence supports $3,000 residual value and three remaining years. A draft schedule recomputes all six years from original cost.
- The delivery vehicle has $50,000 cost and $35,000 accumulated depreciation. Beacon receives $18,000 cash at control transfer to an unrelated noncustomer. A draft entry credits Gain for the full proceeds and leaves the vehicle's accumulated depreciation in the ledger.
- The held-and-used production cell has a supported $60,000 carrying amount, $52,000 applicable undiscounted cash flows, and $44,000 supplied fair value. A draft memo reports an $8,000 loss from the recoverability shortfall.
Required work
For each asset, create a compact bridge from source facts to conclusion. Then:
- classify the packaging-press change using the information timeline and compute its remaining prospective schedule;
- correct the vehicle entry and trace proceeds and gain through the statements, including the indirect operating reconciliation;
- state the production-cell scope controls, apply the recoverability screen, and separately measure any loss;
- list one input or scope control whose failure would stop each conclusion;
- give the controller a preparation conclusion and the finance manager a separate interpretation with specific next evidence to request.
Constraints
Use only the JSON packet, its explicit exclusions, and the named authority records. Do not invent tax effects, a customer relationship, seller financing, goodwill, a held-for-sale classification, valuation workings, a prior-period error, or management motive. Treat fair value as supplied and supported for this exercise, while still naming the evidence a real review would retain.
Do not aggregate the three assets into one carrying amount or offset one event's gain against another event's loss in the working papers. Any final income total must remain reconcilable to separately labeled components.
Evaluation
Technical accuracy and scope/evidence control carry 60 percent. Articulation, interpretation, and communication carry 40 percent. A numerically correct memo that skips classification, asset identity, or statement tracing is incomplete.