I will try to elaborate on my point which has been considered initially. But first, there is an important question ... How do you want to see the depreciation distributed on the General Ledger level ? According to your explanation, I would think that you want to have the depreciation per department as a secondary distribution while keeping the original "class" classification which could be the general common categorization such as; Furniture, Buildings, Lands ...etc
In this essence, let me provide further insights on the possible approaches or scenarios that you could consider depending on your business needs.
Scenario One - Primary Fixed Asset classes (Furniture, Buildings, Software, Lands ... ) and additional department-based depreciation amounts
In case this is what you are looking for, you need to do the following in order to achieve the required results
1- Setup accounts and associated Account Groups based on your primary classification, so that each of the classes has a shared characteristics
- Furniture could have a depreciation percentage of (20), which means 5 years and 9 days
- Equipments could have a depreciation percentage of (15) which meas 6 years and 243
- Lands ..
- Buildings ...
- ...etc
In this essence, the classification of your classes is primarily dependent on the depreciation laws in your country so that you can have consistent control over your Fixed Assets. These classes will be associated with a similar account group classification as follows:
- For Furniture, you will create the following:
- Asset Cost\ Furniture
- Depreciation Expense\ Furniture
- Accumulated Depreciation\ Furniture
- For Buildings, you will create the following:
- Asset cost\ Building
- Depreciation Expense\ Building
- Accumulated Depreciation\ Building
and so on and so forth.
Now the department distribution is not totally valid in this case for all the asset. For instance, your equipments could be placed across different departments, but you have one land for all the department. So, to get this "department" allocation, you can consider the following
- Consider additional fields (which will give reporting classification, not GL classification), such as the location ID or Structure ID
- Consider the Analytical Accounting Transaction dimension for Fixed asset, which will provide further analytical capabilities on the depreciation amounts
All of the above means that your GL will have the primary classification, while the Fixed Asset module will provide the department-based depreciation amounts
Scenario Two - Department based classification of Fixed Assets
In such a scenario, I would suppose that you don't want to have your assets classified according to the general classification (Building, lands ...etc), rather It is a department based. In this essence, you will create several classes for your assets, each of them will be linked to a department account group.
For instance,
- Asset Cost\ Administration
- Depreciation Expense\ Administration
- Accumulated Deprecation\ Administration
I do not think this is a common issue, as different assets with different depreciation characteristics could exist in the same class, and have the same account group. Beside that you said, I want something apart from the "class id", which means that you are using the class id for a different purpose.
Anyway, I hope the clarifications above made things clear and would help you make the proper decision on how to proceed. If you need any further assistance, you can freely share your concerns
Your feedback is highly appreciated,