Costpoint Online Help

Fixed Assets

Use Costpoint Fixed Assets to track and report asset cost, depreciation expense, and disposals for all types of property, including company-owned assets, contractor-acquired property, and government-furnished equipment. Enter and retrieve complete inventory, maintenance, and transfer data in a variety of user-specified formats.

Asset Data Tracking

The core of Costpoint Fixed Assets is the master property record, in which over 250 standard fields are available for data entry. These fields are grouped by category and summarized as follows:

Category Description
Descriptive Information
  • Enter extensive descriptive data (up to 344 total characters).
  • Assign property type, classification code, and subclass code.
  • Set flags to indicate record status (active, inactive, or disposal).
  • Initialize depreciation status (depreciable or non-depreciable).
  • Set basis for depreciation method (years, units of usage, or lease periods).
Purchase Information
  • Enter acquisition time period data.
  • Establish property condition (new or used).
  • Record additional purchase details, including manufacturer, vendor, purchase order, receiving, and accounts payable data.
Cost Information
  • Enter unit and cost details.
Location Information
  • Record general location data, such as city, state/province, county, postal code, and country.
  • Use three additional user-specified location fields to enter additional optional location information, such as building, room number, or bin number.
  • Use optional location group templates to import pre-established sets of location data with just a few keystrokes.
Notes
  • Enter optional comments.
Account Information
  • Assign Account-Organization-Project-Reference1-Reference2 for "ownership" (balance sheet accounts, projects, expense accounts, and so on) for both depreciable and non-depreciable property.
  • Assign depreciation expense and accumulated depreciation account codes for depreciable property.
G/L Book Information
  • Assign the depreciation method and salvage percent or value.
  • Establish the depreciation start date and optional in-service date.
  • During initialization, record prior and current fiscal year data for historical records.
  • Enter and view data for leases and units of usage methods.
  • View the results of system calculations and postings.
Other Books Information
  • For depreciable records, enter depreciation information in up to nine additional optional books.
  • Edit and view current period system depreciation expense calculations for each book on the Asset Master screens.
User-Defined Information
  • Add user-defined field data in date, numeric, text, and validated text formats.
  • Specify whether user-defined data should be required before saving an Asset Master record.
  • For validated text options, choose to require validation against user-supplied data or against existing Costpoint table data.
Government Information
  • Add data such as the national stock number and tag number in four standard fields.
  • Assign optional custodial data that is validated against the Costpoint Employee table.
  • Enter additional government data in 15 user-defined text fields.
Disposal Information
  • View disposal data and disposal posting details for each book.
Template Functionality
  • Create location group templates to store and import frequently used location data combinations into Asset Master records.
  • Create asset master templates to store and import common data into Asset Master records. Asset Template data can be entered in over 60 standard fields as well as in other book fields and in user-defined fields. You can use asset templates when new records are added manually or autocreated, and/or during the initialization of your historical data.
Depreciation Functionality
  • Calculate depreciation based on years, units of usage, or lease periods.
  • Use up to 10 different books for depreciation calculations and reporting.
  • Set up an unlimited number of user-defined depreciation methods, using Date of Purchase or Fiscal Year basis.
  • Configure system depreciation calculations to:
  • Spread prior period depreciation missed in the current purchase or fiscal depreciation year among the remaining periods in the purchase year (PY) or fiscal year (FY), or
  • Add the missed prior period depreciation to the current period depreciation amount.
  • For Date of Purchase basis methods, specify whether the system-wide configuration for depreciation computations should be based on the number of periods in a purchase year or on the actual number of days "owned" per period.
  • Set up percentage allocations for posting depreciation expense to multiple G/L accounts per single asset record.
  • Project future depreciation expense for each book, by period and FY, for an unlimited number of future fiscal years.
  • Project future asset purchases (and premature disposals) and decide whether or not to include these in future depreciation expense calculations.
  • Retain depreciation expense history by period and fiscal year for all books.
Posting

Depreciation, disposal, and transfer entries are automatically posted directly to Costpoint General Ledger. Although a summary entry by account/organization/project is posted to the G/L, the details of the posting on an asset-by-asset basis are stored in Costpoint Fixed Assets. All posted transaction data for any historical time periods can be retrieved from Fixed Assets to provide the detailed support for each summary General Ledger posting.

You can also reverse a current period posting in the current period only.

Other Integration Features

Currently, many system validations within Costpoint Fixed Assets rely on data (such as Account-Organization-Project-Reference1-Reference2 account combination data and fiscal year/period/subperiod information, and so on) found in other Costpoint modules.

You can use the optional autocreation feature to automatically create Asset Master records by importing data from Costpoint Purchasing, Receiving, and/or Accounts Payable, thus reducing the need for duplicate data entry in Costpoint Fixed Assets.

Projections Features

You can use the compute, inquiry, and print functions in the Projections menu to calculate, view, and print depreciation expense for currently owned assets and/or for projected purchases for future fiscal years/periods, by book. You can also enter and print estimated future asset purchases. In addition, you can enter and print projected disposals of currently owned depreciable assets for which disposals are anticipated in advance of their stated useful life.

Asset Master and Asset Template Change/Global Change Functions

You must first decide whether you want the system to capture change data and, if so, whether you want to capture change data for Asset Master records, Asset Template records, or both. The system can capture the asset/template record identifier, the name of each changed field, the old data from before the change, the new data after the change, information on the user ID who performed the change, and the date and time of the change.

First, use the Configure Asset/Template Change Settings screen to select your preferences for specific actions to be performed by the system when you use the optional features available in Costpoint Fixed Assets to capture and store change data for fields/columns in the Asset Master and/or Asset Template records.

You must then select check boxes on a field-by-field basis for Asset Master and/or Asset Template records, as applicable. Each check box that you select signifies that you want to capture data for that field for an Asset Master and/or Asset Template record each time you make a change to that data, regardless of the screen in which the change was made.

You can also perform global data changes on all user-editable fields in Asset Master and Asset Template records, including those that are user-defined. You can use the Query button on the toolbar to select the subset of records for which one or more changes are desired. Because most Asset Master/Template fields are available as selection criteria, you can define a very specific subset of Asset Master records upon which to perform global changes.

Once the change details have been captured, you can view change data from the Asset Audit Log on the View Asset Change History screen and/or data from the Template Audit Log on the View Template Change History Screen. The system captures the asset/item number, field changed, old data, new data, user ID, and change date and time. You can print change data reports from the Asset Audit Log or the Template Audit Log on the Print Asset/Template Change History Report screen.

Another option available related to change features is the ability to post transfer entries to the General Ledger. You can have transfers entries automatically generated by the system when you make changes to the asset ("ownership") account, organization, and project fields and/or the Accumulate Depreciation Account Code fields in an Asset Master record.

Asset Location Preprocessor Functions

Use the Import Asset Locations screen to import an ASCII file that has been produced by reading property bar code labels with a bar code scanner.

Costpoint Fixed Assets has automatic integration features with Intermec 2400 series hand-held bar code scanners models 2410, 2415, 2420, and 2425. (These scanner models are not equipped with radio frequency transmission capability). If you use one of these Intermec scanner models, the ASCII file is automatically created with the correct format so that it can be seamlessly uploaded into Costpoint Fixed Assets without further user intervention. If your scanning hardware is a different Intermec model or is from a different manufacturer, you can edit the format of the bar code input file to match Deltek's ASCII file format requirements.

The system automatically compares the results of the scanned location data with the location data already residing in the Asset Master record and writes the location "mismatches" (exceptions) to an Exceptions table. The Manage Asset Location Exceptions screen displays exceptions found, such as an invalid asset/item number, invalid location group, invalid location code, and so on. Once you have edited the exceptions, you can use the Import Asset Locations screen to import the corrected data directly from the Exceptions table to the Asset Master records.

Additional selection criteria permit you to specify additional options to be performed along with the reading of the input file location data. These options include:

  • Printing a discrepancies report;
  • Updating location data in Asset Master records;
  • Creating audit trail records to capture changes made as a result of updating location data in Asset Master records; and/or
  • Creating inventory event records on the Manage Asset Inventory Information screen.
Inventory, Maintenance, Transfer Data

You can currently maintain inventory, maintenance, and/or transfer data on three screens for all types of property records. Eight user-defined fields are available for data entry on each of the three types of tracking history screens. You can optionally create templates for inventory, maintenance, or transfer data, and select a range of records to be automatically populated with the template data after making edits. Finally, you can view historical inventory, maintenance, and/or transfer data online on a record-by-record basis or print this data via standard system reports.

You can use the Import Asset Locations screen to import an ASCII file that has been produced as a result of reading property bar code labels with a bar code scanner. You have the option, on this screen, to automatically create inventory event records on the Manage Asset Inventory Information screen.

Note about Transfer Data:

In previous Costpoint versions, you could record change data only by using options from the following screens in the Transfer Records menu:

  • Manage Asset Transfer Information and/or the Create Asset Transfer Transactions
  • Manage Asset Transfer Transactions
  • Create Asset Transfer Information

Beginning with Costpoint Version 4.0, additional features were added to provide more sophisticated options to handle the tracking of change events such as transfers. Please refer to the previous paragraphs that summarize the Asset Master Change/Global Change Functions for more information.

Because of the greater capability to store transfer data (change details) using the advanced Asset Master change features in this release, you will probably use these new features in place of the older Transfer Records menu selections. You can access the advanced features using the Asset/Template Changes menu options.

You can use the Copy Transfer Data to Asset Audit Log utility from the Fixed Assets Utilities menu to copy transfer data that was manually added in earlier Costpoint versions to the Asset Audit Log, so that all the desired "change" data can be retrieved from a single source, via inquiry or report.