¶ … Noncurrent Assets Current assets

One may define assets as those properties that are under the ownership or are the possession of a firm. Assets are divided into two like current assets and long-term assets. Long-term assets include land, buildings, and firm vehicles. Current assets are those assets that the firm can easily change their form of cash and they are perceived to take less than one year. Such assets include cash, debtors and stock (Vause, 2009).

Noncurrent assets

This is the other group of assets apart from the current assets but current assets are expected to change their form within the period of one year (the normal business operating cycle). The major non-current assets are as follows: long-term investment, intangible assets, equipment, plant and property. We have other terms that people are used in place of non-current assets and they include long-lived assets, long-term assets and fixed assets just to name but a few (Vause, 2009).

Equipment, plant and property are the only available assets with state of physical existence. One may decide to call them tangible fixed assets that are also recommendable. These physical non-current assets are further divided into classes like vehicles, buildings, land improvements and land. Land improvements are the structural extras added on to land for example landscaping, fences, parking lots and so on (Alexander, Britton & Jorissen, 2007).

Intangible fixed assets are defined as the assets which do not have a physical existence and they include goodwill, copyrights, and patents and so on. One may define long-term investments as the...

For example, a company uses five million to buy ten-year shares of a certain company on 1 January 2010; this will be recorded down as part of the long-term investment because they will be returned back after ten good years as they are under non-current assets (Alexander, Britton, & Jorissen, 2007).
Difference between current and noncurrent assets

The two definitions of fixed assets and current assets make use of the term operating cycle, which is an important business term. It is defined as the period of frequencies in which a business goes through in the course of operations. The operations include three phases, which include collecting, selling and purchasing. The course of this cycle involves cash payment in terms of purchasing and issues a receipt of cash and hence the operating cycle is the average period of cash changing its form but then coming back as cash (cash back to cash).

Current assets include those assets that are not in cash form and they are supposed to be converted to cash, consumed or sold within a maximum period of one year (operating cycle of the business). When writing the balance sheet, the current assets and non-current assets are listed according to their order of liquidity. Liquidity is described as cash available; the faster non-cash assets can be converted into cash (Van, 2007). Current liabilities are those obligations that need elimination within a period of one year (operating cycle of the business). The settling of these liabilities is either done through payment using current assets for example cash, or…