3 Benefits of Fixed Asset Software

Fixed assets have their value measured through two primary factors – their application and their longevity. The former is calculated by their cost versus the delivery of function while the latter is derived from its lifespan. Fixed assets are defined as tangible property that cannot be sold immediately, so fixed asset lifecycles will affect your business’s accounting substantially.

Fixed asset software tracks your tangible assets and calculates their value at every stage of their lifecycle. Sage Fixed Assets (formerly Sage FAS) has been the leader in fixed asset solutions for over 30 years and allows you accurately track and manage all your fixed assets regardless of the size of your inventory. The inherent scalability of Sage Fixed Assets enables full control over your fixed asset accounting process and ensure you demonstrate best practices in fixed asset management.

Here are three benefits of fixed asset software such as Sage Fixed Assets to track and manage your company assets:

1. Asset Visibility
Ensuring that your fixed assets deliver their full value to your organization requires you to perform a deep dive into the entirety of their lifecycles. This, in turn, obliges you to capture data at every stage of their development to accurately map out your fixed assets’ lifecycles. This includes tracking this information up to before these items even become fixed assets as well as being able to account for all possible variables that could affect their status within your fixed asset accounting process.

Fixed asset software such as Sage Fixed Assets allows you to track all company assets at every stage of the fixed asset lifecycle, including construction in progress (CIP) assets involved in ongoing projects. CIP accounting entails recording and managing all costs related to deploying the asset. This includes transportation, storage, and any other preparational functions that must be carried out to ensure the asset can fulfill its practical application.

Sage Fixed Assets allows you track and manage projects, regardless of what category they fall into or how large they are, using detailed reporting that leverages user-defined data fields to give you an overview of your fixed assets according to your internal practices already in place. This functionality enables you to see all the costs associated with your fixed assets and plan for depreciation rates based on consistent data.

2. Fixed Asset Compliance
Depreciation rates of fixed assets and recurring costs in asset-related functions are not the only expenditures or concerns that affect fixed asset accounting procedures. Several financial regulations influence fixed asset reporting requirements, including tax laws and transactional notification obligations. These regulatory responsibilities will additionally shift over time, yet failure to comply with new mandates will incur penalties. Lack of intimate knowledge in compliance will also affect your ROI on fixed assets in the form of losses resulting from pitfalls that cause you to overpay for taxes and insurance fees on your assets.

Leveraging Sage Fixed Assets as your fixed asset compliance software solution empowers you to ensure your asset accounting processes are up-to-date with the most recent financial regulations. Sage Fixed Assets’ internal database includes information on thousands of regulations in the US and Canada that apply to the private, public and nonprofit sectors. The solution is frequently updated to enable continued compliance without additional effort on your end to catalogue regulatory information. The system also includes data on tax exemptions in these updates to ensure you are deriving the most value out of your fixed asset management.

Sage Fixed Assets integrates regulatory information with your depreciation calculations within the system to enable you to generate compliant reporting during your fixed asset accounting processes. This allows you to utilize data within the solution directly to file tax forms for the US IRS and Canadian agencies. The system applies additional regulatory data towards your depreciation accounting processes that ensure consistent compliance throughout your fixed asset reporting.

3. Accounting Automation
A 2017 survey by Bloomberg found that out of 100 executives in the US finance sector, almost half spent an average of four to five days a month using manual processes to track their fixed assets. Another third of those surveyed spent almost two weeks each month instead, meaning that an entire 80 percent of the sample wasted between 25 to 50 percent of their time every month out of the year managing their fixed assets with outdated procedures.

Automating your fixed asset accounting procedures using Sage Fixed Assets allows you not only to better manage time costs on depreciation calculating, but also to generate monetary returns in optimized practices. Sage Fixed Assets automated features deliver more accurate accounting using built-in rules for asset bookkeeping that keep track of depreciating asset costs throughout their lifecycles. It also allows you to deploy these records as historical data to track and identify key assets and manage fixed asset costs.

Sage Fixed Assets integrates with your ERP software solution to populate your fixed asset accounting data into your financial ledger modules. This affords you a comprehensive view of all your fixed asset expenses for accurate budgeting of your company assets. SWK Technologies can provide additional customizations to allow for a more seamless integration with your Sage Fixed Assets solutions and other modules utilizing fixed asset financial data to ensure you have the most optimal fixed asset software.