Fixed Asset Management: Tips for Uploading Mid Life Assets

If you are thinking of implementing NetSuite's Fixed Asset Management Bundle, you will most likely have existing assets that are currently being depreciating. These are the Mid Life Assets that you will need to bring into the Fixed Asset module. I want to share with you some tips and tricks that have helped me when I've uploaded assets for customers.

Tips

• Upload Asset Type First and Set Up with Correct GL Accounts and Depreciation Active Status. Asset Type is a required field in the FAM Asset CSV upload. It is important to set these up correctly so it saves you from having to manage it in the Asset upload file. For instance, having all your GL accounts set complete and correctly means you just need to worry about validating one field, Asset Type, versus 6 separate GL account field.
  
  
• Excel Formulas. Here are a few handy Excel formulas that made manipulating the CSV data a little easier.
  • DATEDIF({select the Depreciation Start Date cell},{select the Last Deprecation Date cell},"M")+1
    • This formula calculates the number of periods that have already passed in the depreciation schedule. This is best used to calculate the Last Depreciation Period data.
  • EOMONTH({select the cell with the Acquisition Date},0)
    • This formula calculates the last day of the month. This comes in handy when calculating Depreciation Start Date from the Acquisition Date or to calculate the Transaction Date for Depreciation History if you are loading all depreciation periods.
  • EDATE({select Date},{select the number of months to add})
    • This formula calculates a date X months from the date you select. For instance, if cell C3 =2/28/21 and you want to know the date 3 months from today, the formula will be =EDATE(C3,3), which results in 5/28/21.
• Upload Historical Depreciation in One Lump Sum. So there are 2 ways you can upload historical depreciation.
  • You can upload each individual period. For example, if you had an asset with 60 months asset live and have depreciated 15 periods by now, your CSV file will need 15 lines representing each period for each asset. As you can imaging, this becomes very tedious. On the positive, this will allow you to run depreciation history reports with this detail.
  • You can upload all cumulated depreciation in one period. This makes it a lot easier from a data management perspective
    
    
• Precompute Depreciation Values After Loading Depreciation History. This step generates the depreciation schedule for the remaining life of the asset. If you calculate it prior to uploading the asset's depreciation history then it calculate a depreciation schedule starting from the acquisition month, instead of from the last depreciation period. This will cause duplicate depreciation when you run the Asset Depreciation function. If you accidently ran before you uploaded the history, then see Delete Depreciation History Records Tip below.
  
  
• Create Saved Import Templates and Test Import. This is generally a good NetSuite best practice when uploading through Import Assistant. Take a good sample set of the assets and create a test upload to iron out any formatting or mapping issues.
  
  
• Delete Depreciation History Records. If you made a mistake and uploaded the wrong historical depreciation data or accidently triggered the Precompute Depreciation Values too soon, there are a few ways to remove those records so that you can generate or upload new ones.
  • Trigger Reset Values. Reset Values can be found in the Fixed Assets Setup window. This function or button is only visible when there is a change on an asset record that impacts the value or the depreciation schedule of an asset. Part of this process is to delete the old records. In order to reveal this function or button, you can go to the asset to be correct, edit and change the Depreciation Active from True to False and save, and then edit again and change it back to True. Now go to Fixed Asset --> Setup --> System Setup to Reset Value. Once Reset Value is completed, you can make the necessary changes or corrections and rerun the Precompute Depreciation Values function.
  • Delete Asset. There are 2 ways to delete an asset.
    • Go to the asset record itself, edit, and delete. You will need to make sure all related transactions are also deleted first.
    • If this is a an asset that was uploaded through the Import Assistant, you can go to Fixed Assets --> Setup --> Delete Asset. Here you can delete each asset completely one by one or through a CSV import.
  • Delete the Depreciation History Records directly. This is not typically recommended as the volume of depreciation records is high and harder to pinpoint the correct records to delete. If you do know what records to delete, you can go to Global Search and type in "FAM Depreciation History". This will take you to a list of the depreciation history records, which includes the ones you uploaded and the ones the system generated for the asset's depreciation schedules.

Now that you have your assets and depreciation history loaded, you can easily manage asset generation and ongoing maintenance of your Fixed Assets. Refer to Concentrus's series of Fixed Asset Management Short 'n Suite videos for a quick tutorial.

If you are interested in implementing this or other NetSuite modules/bundles, give us a call and we can help implement for you or, if you want to self-implement, we can help guide you.

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