05 November 2009

Weekly Review: Fixed Asset/GL Best Practices

If you use GP Fixed Assets, you know that if you run all your Fixed Asset processes (Add, Retire, Depreciate, etc.) together and then run the GL Posting routine, you get one big journal entry with all of your transactions. This makes is very difficult to find and correct any errors.

The easiest way around this is to separate asset changes from depreciation. Make all of your asset additions, retirements and changes, then run the GL Posting routine (Tools-Routines-Fixed Assets-GL Posting) before you run depreciation for the period. This will give you a much cleaner GL transaction making it easy to ensure that the your GL clearing account is properly cleared. After that, run depreciation and do a separate GL Posting for depreciation.

When processing your GL Posting routine, set the periods from the beginning of the year to the current period. This way if something didn't post properly in a prior period it will come out for cleanup. For example, if someone added a fixed asset before you closed the month but after you ran your GL Posting interface, it's still sitting in the prior month. Running the GL Interface for only this period, won't cause this transaction to post. But if you run the GL interface from the beginning of the year, it will at least make it into this month's transactions.

Using this technique will get you good, clean FA to GL transactions every month.

Posted by Mark 5/09/2006 02:24:00 PM