Is Managing Fixed Assets w/Excel Still a Smart Decision?
3 Ways to Determine if Excel is Helping or Hurting Your Ability to Manage Assets
Whether you have a company with 25 Employees or 2500, there are many reasons to track the assets within the organization. Tax accountants want to track the depreciation and property taxes for the assets. Facility managers want to know where in the building the assets are located. Finally, Information Technologies (IT) need to know who has the asset and possibly when will it return back to their offices for updates and maintenance.
Excel is the grandfather solution for all of the departments mentioned above.
However, is it still the best choice for your needs? Here’s how you can find the answer:
- If you have less than 500 line items, Excel can swiftly manage the details of the assets and in addition, updating depreciation for those assets won’t be very cumbersome. But, when you have more than 500 line items in Excel to track, it becomes more time consuming and cumbersome to change the details in the assets as well as, include new calculations for “ever changing” depreciation tax breaks.
- If you work in a Non-for-profit environment or Government entity, Excel may work nicely for depreciation because usually there are not complicated tax calculations. However, the auditors can be tough on these types of corporations and require a full wall-to-wall inventory validation with a Sarbanes Oxley compliant software.
- Excel is a workable solution for those corporations that have assets in one primary location. The worksheet can easily track State, Federal and Local taxes for one location. But, if you have more than one location that includes various state and local tax figures, Excel will seriously delay the process monthly or annually.
Excel is HELPING you manage your fixed assets if:
- You have less than 500 assets.
- Or you’re Non-profit and won’t be required to do a full wall-to-wall inventory validation with a Sarbanes Oxley compliant software.
- If you have less than 500 assets located all in one location.
Excel is HURTING your abilities to properly manage your fixed assets if:
- You have more than 500 assets (no matter if they are all in one or multiple locations)
- Sooner or later you will be required to do a full wall-to-wall inventory validation with a Sarbanes Oxley compliant software.
- Require tax updates.
Have you (and your fixed assets) outgrown Excel?
If you’ve decided it might be time to streamline your fixed asset management by replacing Excel with a more robust software solution, request a free price quote here.
