During a recent webinar, one of our viewers asked “If I have only made a minimal profit in 2021, can I delay the asset write off to 2022 when my business is more profitable and there's more to write off?”

My answer: I guess in a way that depends -  it depends on when you purchase and receive that asset, because technically if you use the small business depreciation rules, you have to use them all. You've got the option whether you claim the remaining assets in your business pool (and this is a hectic tax thing right now I'm going into) but before this huge write-off came into play, what we do is we'd write off all of your remaining assets over a number of different years and we claim 30% a year for the pool of your assets. 

Now, in last financial year and in this financial year, we were able to claim the whole lot if it was under a certain value - now it's under an unlimited value, and what that means is you do have the option to write off the pool or not. If you do have a low income year, it may not make sense to write off that pool. 

But back to the original question; if you buy new assets, you still should be depreciating them under the small business rules. And that might mean if you haven't bought the asset yet, maybe wait until next year to receive it.

Watch the full webinar at https://learning.benwalker.com/courses/asset-finance