Manage fixed assets

The Fixed Assets functionality in Business Central provides an overview of your fixed assets and ensures correct periodic depreciation. It also enables you to keep track of your maintenance costs, manage insurance policies, post fixed asset transactions, and generate various reports and statistics.

Video overview

The following video covers the basics of fixed assets:

Fixed assets overview

For each fixed asset, you must set up a card containing information about the asset. You can set up buildings or production equipment as a main asset with a component list, and you can group them in various ways, such as by class, department, or location. Then you can begin to acquire, maintain, and sell the fixed assets. You can also set up budgeted assets. Budgeting lets you include any anticipated acquisitions and sales in reports.

Important

Before you can manage fixed assets, you must complete the following setups:

• Default values
• Fixed asset accounting
• Posting groups
• Allocation keys
• Fixed asset journals

For more information, see Setting Up Fixed Assets.

To track fixed asset depreciations and other financial transactions for fixed assets, set up one or more depreciation books for each one. Depreciation is done by running a report to calculate periodic depreciation, filling in a journal with the resulting entries, and then posting the journal. Business Central supports several depreciation methods. For more information, see Depreciation Methods. You can set up multiple depreciation books per fixed asset for different purposes, such as one for tax reporting and another for internal reporting.

For each asset, you can record maintenance costs and the next service date. Tracking maintenance expenses can be important for budgeting purposes and deciding whether to replace a fixed asset.

You can attach each fixed asset to one or more insurance policies, and verify that policy premiums align with the value of the assets.

Note

You can record fixed asset transactions on the Fixed Asset G/L Journal page or on the Fixed Asset Journal page, depending on whether the transactions are for financial reporting or for internal management. Help for Fixed Assets only describes how to use the Fixed Asset G/L Journal page. For more information, see Set Up Fixed Asset Depreciation.

How to use fixed assets

The following table describes a sequence of tasks, with links to the articles that describe them.

To	See
Set up prerequisites for using the fixed assets feature (defining default values, fixed asset accounting, posting groups, allocation keys, journals, and posting types).	Setting Up Fixed Assets
Create fixed assets, assign depreciation methods, post acquisitions, salvage values, and print fixed asset lists.	Acquire Fixed Assets
Record service visits, post maintenance costs, and monitor maintenance costs.	Maintain Fixed Assets
Update insurance information, post acquisition costs to insurance policies, modify insurance coverage, view insurance statistics, and list insurance policies.	Insure Fixed Assets
Reclassify fixed assets, transfer fixed assets to different locations, split up or combine assets.	Transfer, Split, or Combine Fixed Assets
Adjust values of fixed assets, post appreciation, and post write-down transactions.	Revalue Fixed Assets
Calculate depreciation, post depreciation, and analyze depreciation in fixed assets reports.	Depreciate or Amortize Fixed Assets
Learn about different fixed asset depreciation methods.	Depreciation Methods
Post disposal transactions, view disposal ledger entries, and post partial disposals.	Dispose of or Retire Fixed Assets
Manage fixed asset budgets, budget acquisition costs, budget disposals of fixed assets, and budget depreciation.	Manage Budgets for Fixed Assets
Learn more about built-in reporting and analytics capabilities for fixed assets.	Fixed assets reports and analytics

See also

Setting Up Fixed Assets
Finance overview
Getting Ready for Doing Business
Work with Business Central
Change Which Features are Displayed

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