Hi all, 

Just curious if anyone has any best practices within Quickbooks Online for tracking their fixed assets and depreciation. 

In the desktop version of the product, I would typically have in my chart of accounts one parent account for an asset type and sub-accounts for each specific asset. 

Example: 

Machinery and Equipment
-- Equipment #1 - Cost
-- Equipment #2 - Cost
etc. 

I would then have one parent account for depreciation of that asset type and sub-accounts for each specific asset. 

Example: 

Accumulated Depreciation of Machinery and Equipment
-- Accumulated Deprecation of Equipment #1
-- Accumulated Deprecation of Equipment #2
etc. 

The benefit of this for me is that the total cost of the assets and the total amount of accumulated depreciation automatically sum in reports, so it is very easy to prepare the financial statements from this data. 

Now, in Quickbooks Online (I'm a new user) I see there is checkbox when creating an asset account to track deprecation. This automatically creates a cost and depreciation sub-account, both nested under the asset account. 

This looks nice visually but lacks the benefit of automatically totalling up all cost and all deprecation for that asset class. 

I'm wondering, what are the benefits of using Quickbooks' built in accounts for cost and depreciation vs. creating them manually? Do these accounts serve any purpose beyond the convenience of having them created for you and the visual appeal?

Will I be missing any other functionality if I create my own depreciation accounts using the main depreciation account as the parent instead? 

Would love to hear how others are tracking assets and deprecation as well. 

Thanks!