Correcting an assets life for a prior year

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What is the best way to correct an asset's life in GP once the prior fiscal year has been closed? When I originally added the new asset I failed to enter the asset's life. I added this asset to our test company and changed the asset life from 0 years to 10 years and recalulated life to see what would happen. It appears that this would fix my problem. Is this the correct way or best practice to fix the asset life?

I compared the depreciation report for the prior year before & after the correction was made. I noticed that my changes were reflected on the report on the revised YE depreciation report. Before we ran our YE close I did save all of the reports for 2014. When an asset's life is changed in a different fiscal year, does it always affect the prior year's reports?

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L Vail 65,271 on at

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Have you closed your Fixed Assets year? Anyway, resetting the life is the right way to go if you want to know what should have been calculated for the previous year. If FA is already closed it won't work that way. GP 2013 changed the way FA works so that you can reprint prior year reports, I still didn't think it actually let your change the data after the FA year was closed. If FA isn't closed, you're good to go.

Kind regards,

Leslie
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Heather Roggeveen 9,150 on at

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Hi

I have been doing quite a bit of work on this lately. You can absolutely still make changes to the prior year after FA year end is run.

The FA calendar and Fiscal Calendar work independently. The change in depreciation will update FA with the prior year amounts. The GL Posting determines which fiscal year the changes post into.

E.g.

Fiscal / FA Year End 31/12/2014.

Asset added November 2014 but no life. You would have seen that post through to the GL for the additions in November 2014.

February 2015, you notice the life. Go back, enter the original life, recalculate the life.

Impact:

FA periods 2014-011 and 2014-012, 2015-001, 2015-002 (assuming averaging convention of full period) will update with the relevant depreciation amount.

Asset card: Current depreciation field will show four months depreciation (this is the only piece I am not 100% sure on - it may only show two months). Life to date depreciation will show four months. Year to date depreciation will only show two months.

When you do the GL posting, you need to select from FA period 2014-011 to current to get all amounts to post. You can then post into the current fiscal period.

You can use the FA to GL Posting report (Activity Report) to show what actually posted to the GL in a fiscal year. You can use these numbers linked to the FA Activity reports to be able to show auditors the difference between what happened in FA and what was posted.

The Fixed Asset Reports definitely work of Fixed Asset periods for things like the depreciation, so you would definitely see the change reflected there.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Heather
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Community Member on at

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Thanks so much for your help Heather. Very helpful.
L Vail 65,271 on at

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Thank you Heather!

I have added this to my archive of articles on Fixed Assets.

Kind regards,

Leslie
Heather Roggeveen 9,150 on at

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I have started to put some pretty detailed information together to create a blog on it - but it is taking a while to complete. I'll add a link here once I have published it.