There are a few confusing issues with MS Dynamics GP Fixed Assets.  One of the most confusing is probably how FA integrates to GL.  What entries are made and when into a GL posting batch created by FA?

First add an asset to FA.  Go to Tools – Routines – Fixed Assets – GL Posting.  Fill in the year and period range you want to post, and the date you want on the GL transaction that will be created.

From the result of this batch FATRX00000004 was created in GL with the debit to the FA asset account and a credit to the FA clearing account. Since there had been no depreciation run the only thing in the batch as the asset.

Next run depreciation for the asset.  Tools – Routines – Fixed Assets – Depreciate One Asset. Normally you would depreciate all assets for a book.  Enter the date through which to calculate depreciation, insert the book, and click Depreciate. You should get a pop up message saying Depreciation Completed.

At this point no depreciation entry has been created for GL.  Run the FA GL Posting again.  Tools – Routines – Fixed Assets – GL Posting for the through the period ending date for the recent depreciation run.

As a result of this process GL batch FATRX00000005 was created with a debit to the FA Depreciation Expense account and a credit to the FA Accumulated Depreciation account (or Reserve Account).

If you have closed the FA year and then you add an asset to that closed year you can run the GL Post to GL and capture the cost.  However the depreciation expense will not be entered into the GL batch for the FA closed year.  LTD depreciation on the Asset Book card is updated. The depreciation reports do show the depreciation for the asset.  In this case you would need to make a journal entry for the expense either to the prior or future year GL depending on where you want the expense to show.

Remember the FA year and the GL year are not the same thing and are closed at separate times.

FA year end close should be performed at the end of your fiscal year and before any depreciation runs for the new year.  For example, if your fiscal years end 9/30 you should complete all asset entry, depreciation runs, reports, and the close the FA fiscal year before any FA processing for October which is period one of the new year.  If your fiscal year coincides with the calendar year complete the process after the start of the new calendar year and before any depreciation runs in the new year.

To close the year:

Go to Tools -  Routines – Fixed Assets – Year End

Insert the Book for which to close the year end, click Insert, click Continue. There is no report output from this operation.

After the Year End close verify the new year for the book.  The year end close adds one to the book year.

Go to Tools – Setup – Fixed Assets – Book, select the Book, not the book year is now the previous year plus one.

From the FA Manual:

Before you can close the fiscal year, you must complete the following tasks:

• Enter all activity for the current fiscal year, including asset additions, changes,

transfers, and retirements.

• Process asset depreciation for the final period, through the last day, of the

current fiscal year.

• Post transactions to General Ledger.

• Post the General Ledger batch.

• Process year-to-date depreciation and print activity reports.

• Make a backup of your data.

To close the fiscal year, you must close the asset books and verify data after the

books are closed.

You also can summarize financial detail data and delete inactive asset records.

If the fiscal periods for the new year in the Microsoft Dynamics GP fiscal calendar

have been changed since the Fixed Asset Management calendar was last built, you

should rebuild the Fixed Asset Management fiscal calendar for future years. You

should do this only after you run the year-end process.

There is no error message.  However on checking the depreciation in a period the amount is double.  Why this happens, and typically in the last period of the year I have no idea.  The Fiscal Periods setup for the company is correct and the FA Calendar was correct.  I can only speculate this has something to do with setting the system for Periodic depreciation.  When depreciation was run for the last period a glitch caused the depreciation to be doubled.

Upon researching the methods to fix this I didn’t find one that I liked or that made sense from an ease of use perspective.

Here is the solution to the problem.  You should only use this solution if you have double depreciation in an FA period and  you have discovered it to late to restore to a backup.  Also in this case the FA year was not closed.  You would need to modify these instructions if your year is closed.  I may add that case later to this post.

There are several scripts to run so you will need to launch SQL Enterprise Manager or SQL Studio Manager.  In all cases select the company database that you will be working with.  I also suggest you setup a test database and try this there before doing this in a live database.

If you do not have a test database make sure to backup your company database in SQL and have all users out of the system when you do this.  If it doesn’t work the first time you can restore from a backup.  The two tables FA00902 and FA00200 are easy to manipulate so I don’t think your have much trouble.

Run the follwoing script to delete the last depriciation run from the FA00902 table.  There are several fields you could use to do this I picked the Depreciated To Date field.  The TRANSDATESTAMP field is another good one you could use.

delete FA00902 where DEPRTODATE = ’9/30/2010 12:00:00 AM’

Update the FA00200 table to change the Depreciated To Date field back to the previous period ending date.

update FA00200 set DEPRTODATE = ’8/31/2010 12:00:00 AM’ WHERE DEPRTODATE = ’9/30/2010 12:00:00 AM’

You must also run the following script to correct the field Depreciation Life to Date total field.  The Current Depreciation field will be correct at the end of this process.

update FA00200 set LTDDEPRAMT = LTDDEPRAMT – CURRUNDEPRAMT where DEPRTODATE = ’8/31/2010 12:00:00 AM’

If you do not have an asset group for all assets create and asset group id.  Go to Transactions – Fixed Assets – Select Assets. Create a Group ID called ALL.  Click to highlight the Current Group id ALL.  The screen below will populate with the asset list.  Click Mark and then OK to save.

Go to Transactions – Fixed Assets – Mass Change, select the Asset Group id ALL.  Click on the Book tab and select you book id.  Click Reset Year.  In this case I only wanted to recalculate depreciation for the current year.  I didn’t try Recalculate Remaining but that could have worked also.  You would not do Reset Life as that would set the system to recalculate depreciation from the place in service date for all assets and caused us to have to do more manual work than needed.  Click Apply Changes.

Finally, you can run depreciation for the period you are trying to correct.  Go to Tools – Routines – Fixed Assets – Depreciate.  Enter the Depreciate Target Date, in this case 9-30-2010.  Click on the Book and Insert.  Click Depreciate.

Run the Fixed Assets Depreciation reports and check your totals.   You can also check the Fixed Assets Book card.  You will notice that the Current Depreciation, Year To Date Depreciation, and Life to Date Depreciation should be correct.