LEASING: SPECIAL ASPECTS OF PROPERTY ACCOUNTING IN LESSEE’S BALANCE SHEET

The paper considers the issues of accounting the operations under the lease agreement. The relevance of the research is caused by the fact that leasing as a kind of financial service is widely used in modern business and provides an opportunity to update the production assets of an organization without significant financial costs. The main focus is on the accounting of the lessee, who takes the leased property onto the books, due to the fact that these operations cause a lot of questions and disputes. The paper identifies the basic terms of the lease agreement that are defined by article 432 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation; however from the experience of business and judicial practice or any other cases different conditions may arise that are recognized by the authors as essential: description of the leased object, the size of the lease payments, the methods and frequency of payments of the lessor, etc. The paper offers examples of the correspondence of accounts for the lessee which illustrate the variation of accounting depending on the conditions of the lease agreement. As a result of the study, the author finds that the terms of the agreement and the structure of the lease payment determine the order of reflection of lease transactions in the accounting and tax implications for the parties of the transaction. The author proves the necessity of inclusion of the following conditions into the lease agreement: definition of the holder of the leased property, definition of advance payment and order of its offset, determination of the redemption price of the leased object and the order of ownership transfer at the end of the lease agreement. The examples represent the variation of accounting operations in different wordings of the agreement.