Fixed Assets Module - Challenges with Depreciation Allocation & Leasehold Improvement

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I have some challenges with the fixed assets module in GP:

1. Is it possible to allocate assets to specific departments or cost-centers at the point of capitalizing an asset so that the monthly depreciation automatically gets allocated to the department? The current practice in my company is that all the depreciation expenses for the different classes of assets go into one G/L pool where I then have to manually allocate to the various departments. This does not help me to save time in my monthly close process.

2. GP balances of our leasehold improvements (accumulated depreciation/NBV) don't correlate with the balances we have in our spreadsheet backup, and we have to manually make journal entry adjustment every month to make up for the variance. It will be nice if the fixed asset module when it comes to LHI can be made to recognize when the lease period ends, so that it automatically calculates the depreciation period left. We do full month depreciation, but some of these variances I think is due to the fact that previously, the fixed assets accountant in charge had to depreciate some leasehold improvements in decimals (e.g estimating the remaining life of the lease to be 79.5 months), while someone else in that role at a different time would depreciate a new asset using a rounded-up period. It just can be confusing to keep track of the remaining life of a lease in months, but will be nice if when capitalizing the leasehold, the module asks for the date the lease ends rather than the remaining life.

3. Sometimes when I'm retiring an asset, and that is all I have done so far in the FA module, the G/L posting of that retirement adds some more lines of journal entries I do not understand, example is seeing a single asset being depreciated with the retirement when I did not actually depreciate any asset.

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RogerRogerATX 1,515 on at

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RE: Fixed Assets Module - Challenges with Depreciation Allocation & Leasehold Improvement

1)

You can change the GL accounts after adding an asset if you want - so depreciation could go to a different department. If you allocate you should be able to point the depreciation expense to an allocation account

2) - Can't answer that, the FA module is looking for a set period not an ending date.

3) When you retire an asset it will sometimes depreciate the asset - this is based on your retirement date and the depreciation method you selected for the asset. Example: Midmonth will almost always result in depreciation being calculated and booked during the retirement month. If you look at the book record after retirement you may notice your depreciated through date does not match the retirement date.

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RE: Fixed Assets Module - Challenges with Depreciation Allocation & Leasehold Improvement

Hi Roger,

Thanks for your response.

Most of my challenges with the fixed assets module are more of recommendations that Microsoft can look into except I'm the one working with an old version of GP.

I would appreciate if you can walk me through how to go about your response to my first question.

Where I have almost a thousand records of fixed assets, how do I update each record to automatically charge monthly depreciation to its designated department? (I am relatively new to GP, other fixed assets module I've used in the past would allow me at the point of capitalization to allocate each asset to specific cost-centers/accounts where the depreciation would automatically goes).

Below is a screenshot of the FA capitalization module. In my opinion, Microsoft should update this to include a column that allows one to select the asset owner/depreciating account

For the second part, I do not have issues with asset-classes that have definite life span of say 3-years as this will automatically pull the expected life of the asset when booking, but it is not so with leasehold improvements. Calculating the right number for the "original life year, days" especially in the box that has '274' is the challenge. I got that number based on an asset capitalized in April '16, and the lease life expires Dec. '17

The third part might be a system error thing, but I've seen such some couple of times. Assuming I retired assets A & B in October, while running the G/L posting, I saw retirement entries for A & B, and then depreciation entries for asset C (which I never did anything to, even before depreciating all assets for the month).

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RogerRogerATX 1,515 on at

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RE: Fixed Assets Module - Challenges with Depreciation Allocation & Leasehold Improvement

I'll stew on the last one for a bit...but for your first one. From that screen, on the top menu bar there should be a button that says "Go to"...from there you can go to "Account" to change the different accounts for that asset. (also available under Cards-->Fixed Assets-->Account)

it gets a bit more complicated if you want to split the accounts for each asset.

Back to your last question, the FA GL posting process pulls in all transactions from a specific table in the database (FA Financial Detail FA00902) that haven't been posted to the GL yet. So if a different asset is being pulled in that is the table that would hold the details as to when it was generated - I would start there to figure out why that transaction showed up.

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RE: Fixed Assets Module - Challenges with Depreciation Allocation & Leasehold Improvement

Thank you!!!

I can work with this response

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