If your organization deploys Microsoft Dynamics GP as its Corporate ERP application, or as it was known formerly – Great Plains Dynamics and eEnterprise – we would like to give you some field experience on Fixed Assets.
We assume that you have formal accounting education and pretty familiar with such terms as depreciation,
amortization, Straight-Line, Declined Balance and other depreciating methods – all these features should be available in mid-market ERP application, however we would like to share some more complex issues, which are not apparent or not intuitive to discover:
1. Importing Fixed Assets from legacy accounting system. You can use import tool, available directly in the FA module. However we discovered with real life case studies, that you may want to use formulas in parallel objects setup in FA for each Fixed Asset record. In this situation, we recommend you to build Great Plains Macro – simply records the macro for couple of FA records, then split it into the fields in the tab delimited text file, import it into Excel and use formulas to feed in all you legacy FA items and related numbers. When you are done with this preparation – launch Macro and enjoy several minutes while Dynamics GP FA module converts your legacy data with potentially all your books, locations, structures, physical locations, custodians
2. If you need to retire FA items with back date and you already depreciated it to the current date. Here you need to do depreciation for each individual item with back date to undo recent depreciation records and then interface FA transaction to General Ledger
3. Partial FA item retirement. You can do it for individual item (not available in Mass retire). Partial retirement leaves original Item ID with its original suffix (with proportionally reduced Original Cost, LT depreciation and net book value) and it will create the same ID with new suffix (typically next suffix available, such as if original item has 1 – it will assign the 2)
4. What to do if you closed GP GL year prior to closing FA Year End Routine. Well, this might result in Year to Date depreciation to be incorrect if you do query directly from FA maintenance screen. This is very annoying, as we heard from multiple Great Plains customers. Fix is described in the knowledge base, however it might be difficult to do it without being familiar with GP FA tables structure and not being SQL programmer
5. Fixed Assets module supports multicurrency, so you can do international assets tracking with currency revaluation. When you do retirement or mass retirement, multicurrency also is in the consideration
6. Known issues with Smart List for Fixed Assets. There are reported cases, where Smart List option for FA module disappears and you have to repair the database on SQL level to resurrect it, please, see our dedicated publication in media, back in February 2010
7. How to request help? Please call us 1-866-528-0577, 1-630-961-5918 or email us help@albaspectrum.com We welcome you to request Fixed Assets module web presentation, as well as our products demos: Warehouse Management System, SCM with Advanced Barcoding, posting Server with Workflow, eCommerce extension for Dynamics GP, Timesheets for Microsoft CRM. We serve you locally in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Diego. Plus in USA, Canada, Mexico nationwide via remote support and web sessions. We also are comfortable on the international Corporate ERP and MRP implementation and support market, our consultants speak English, Spanish, Arabic, Portuguese (including Brazilian dialect), French, Russian, Chinese
