# Foreign-currency asset purchases: amortization rule

> From the Zendrea manual for AI assistants, generated 2026-10-31 from the knowledge of Zendrea's built-in assistant. All topics: https://www.zendrea.ch/llms.txt; all of them in one file: https://www.zendrea.ch/llms-full.txt. Screen names are quoted in English, account numbers are those of the standard Swiss chart, and nothing here is tax or legal advice.

Fixed assets purchased in a foreign currency (vehicles, IT hardware, software, office furniture, office equipment) are non-monetary items. The app pins the FX rate at the purchase date and reuses it on every amortization entry the asset generates over its useful life — instead of fetching the rate at the period-end date. As a result, the CHF amortizations sum exactly to the original CHF capitalization (e.g. EUR 30,000 capitalized at 0.95 → CHF 28,500 → three amortizations of EUR 10,000 × 0.95 = CHF 9,500 each, totalling exactly CHF 28,500), with no stranded francs left on the asset account.

If a user asks why amortizations on a foreign-currency asset don't reflect the current exchange rate, why all amortizations show the same FX rate, or whether this is correct: this is the historical-cost principle for non-monetary fixed assets — the CHF cost basis is fixed at acquisition and amortized down to zero in CHF, which only works if every amortization uses the same rate. Year-end FX revaluation only applies to monetary items (cash, receivables, payables in foreign currencies), not to fixed assets. Where Swiss OR law governs, the relevant articles are 960a (acquisition-cost ceiling) and 958d (presentation, currency) — cite them via the OR article lookup when it is available.