The Depreciation Deduction
When you own your home and have a home-based business, you have to record depreciation for the business portion of your home. That's right:When you use your home for business, you are required to take depreciation. When you eventually sell that home, the portion used for business will count as the sale of business property. Even if you've never deducted depreciation, the IRS will act as if you did when recomputing any possible gain on the sale of your “business property.” Since you'll have to pay that tax at some point (real estate values tend to go up), you may as well benefit from the tax deduction now.
To calculate the depreciation, you have to know both the fair market value of your home and how much you paid for it plus the cost of any improvements you've made over the years. The smaller of those two values will be the basis of your depreciation calculation. From that number, deduct the value of land included in the value of your home to get just the building portion (land never gets depreciated, so you have to subtract it). The next step is to multiply that building basis by the IRS depreciation percentage (you can find that at www.irs.gov).
When you have calculated your current depreciation expense, record a regular depreciation journal entry. That includes a debit to depreciation expense and a credit to accumulated depreciation.