Fixing Depreciation Data

Business Case: The client needed to present to their external auditors clear, understandable depreciation reports for the fiscal year just ended. Because of numerous changes to depreciation-sensitive settings in their Internal, Tax, and AMT books, the depreciation reports were very confusing due to all the periodic adjustments that resulted from the changes.

Solution: Clear the depreciation tables, rerun depreciation for all assets.

Here's how it's done:

1. Delete all records in FA00200 for the Book(s) in question. FA00200 is the Asset-Book Master which stores depreciation settings and some summary depreciation info. Deleting this data will remove the Book info for the assets.

2. Delete all records in FA00902 for the Book(s) in question. FA00902 is the Asset Financials Detail Master. It stores the periodic depreciation amounts for each asset. Deleting this data removes ALL depreciation amounts from the beginning of time for each asset.

3. Re-add the book info for each asset by going to the Asset General Card. Pull up the first asset, click the ‘Auto-Add Book Info’ checkbox at the lower left corner of the window, scroll to the next asset, click ‘Yes’ when it asks you if you want to Save, then click ‘OK’ when the next window tells you that certain other Book(s) already exist. This step is recreating the records in FA00200. You must do this for every one of your assets. There is no easier way to do this that I’m aware of.

4. After you’ve re-added all your Book(s) info back to the assets, run the Fixed Assets Books SmartList and verify that you have Book(s) setup for each asset. You can verify this by comparing the number of assets that are returned when you filter on each Book compared to the number of active assets in your system.

5. Once you’re satisfied that the Book(s) have been setup for all assets, run depreciation on all assets through the year and period that corresponds with your most recent depreciation posting. This will repopulate FA00902 with all periodic amounts for the Book(s).

6. Delete the FATRX batch that is generated from GL posting!! You don’t want to post years worth of depreciation again!

This process will result in depreciation reports that are clean and easy to understand. If your Accumulated Depreciation account(s) tied to your depreciation reports before, they still will. If they didn't, now's the time to make adjusting journal entries so they do!