Fixed Assets in Dynamics GP: Change, Retire, Transfer Asset Groups

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If in your organization you are deploying FA module as one of the critical ones, we would like to share some experience maintaining it in large organizations.  Let’s review such procedures as mass change, retire, transfer and partial versions of transfer and retirement.  Plus, some hints on how to automate the procedures, designed for manual data modification.  We will be basing our recommendations on version 2010/11.0, however Fixed Assets module is probably the same with minor improvements down to version 7.5, 7.0, where you do not have home page, lists, and advanced navigation pane, which is present in 9.0, 10.0 and newer releases:

1. Mass Change, open it in Financial Transactions Fixed Assets info pane (for older versions Transactions -> Financials -> FA Mass Change).  This is the tool to update info for the Asset Group.  Asset Group should normally be created and updated every time before mass transactions, as if you added new assets since the last group build, the new ones are not included in the old group.  Mass change doesn’t create audit trail, use mass transfer if future auditing is important in your organization.  Mass transfer, however can only do part of the job, that could be done on mass change.  For example, you cannot reset Book, Class and Book/Class depreciation information, as well as user defined fields.  Both Change and Transfer should be a good tool, if you are reassembling moved quantities from the same asset under new Master Asset ID.  If the fields you need to update are not present in these forms, you can still mass update by using FA Import tool, just prepare text files for the assets to update.  Consider exporting the group into the text file, then update the fields in Excel and reimport it back

2. Partial Transfer and Retirement.  These are possible for the individual asset only.  Partial logic is not available in mass versions.  When you transfer or retire portion of the asset, new asset with the same id and incremented suffix is created for the moment and immediately turned into transferred or retired.  Transfer portioning could be based on percentage, quantity or cost.  If percentage, quantity or cost is entered, the system adjusts percentage if it is with discrepancy with quantity.  If quantity is in discrepancy with cost, the cost is used for resetting the quantity.  Partial retirement could be undone in Retire Undo (Transactions -> Fixed Assets -> Retire Undo).  In order to undo, original asset (with originally created suffix) should exist and be active and retire should be being done in the current fiscal year

3. How to do mass partial retire or transfer?  If you have to apply fractional retire or transfer for tons of thousands of assets manual update might be not practical.  We recommend you to use macro technique.  Record macro, where you are retiring just one partially (close all the forms, you do not use in the logic and be very laconic in recording).  Then open macros as text file in Excel, split each of its parts into columns on the first row, especially important to have separate columns for asset specific information: ID, Percentage, Cash Proceeds, Non-Cash Proceeds, Expenses of Sale, Cost, Quantity, retirement date, type (as it is participating in deciding if the gain is recognized or non-recognized).  Use Excel formulas and Series to produce the number of lines, coinciding with the number of assets to process.  Then save it back into the text file and try your macro against the test company to be sure that it does the job

4. Bonus topic.  Back out depreciation.  Elegant way to roll out incorrect depreciation, that was already posted or created and ready to be posted to General Ledger is this.  Open Financial Routines and pick Depreciate One Item, here backdate it and you will get the prompt “The target date you have entered is before the depreciation to date for this asset.  Should you continue, depreciation will be backed out…”.  Here the original depreciation which was probably already interfaced with GL will not be deleted – it will be reversed next time, when you do GL posting routine in FA

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Source by Andrew Karasev