I’ve received a request from a customer that they want to use depriciate the same amount every month instead of as standard the same amount per day. The “problem” is that the months does not have the same number of days and this way the depriciation does not look good “on the books”! I have not been able to find a way to set this up in Attain. Does anyone have a clue if this is possible or if I need to make a modification to solve this request? Best regards, Erik P. Ernst, webmaster
I’ve had a look at this before and don’t think it is possible. From an accounting point of view I believe Attain is exactly correct, but it doesn’t quite look ‘pretty’ in the ledgers. The nearest you can get is to use the Force No. of days feature on the depreciation calculation routine. But this will only allow integers and you would need to force 30.416 days to be accurate. Maybe this could be modded to allow a decimal calculation?
Adam, I’m not saying that Attain is doing it wrongly. Not at all. But to an accountant it doesn’t look pretty. He counts in “accounting-periods” not in days. And the period-perspective is also generally accepted - it is they way everyone used to do it when they did it manually. But programming wise you’re able to make a much “nicer/easier” code by using days. Best regards, Erik P. Ernst, webmaster
Erik, Had another look at this. You can achieve an equal monthly depreciation amount if you set up the depreciation tables. I created a depreciation table with 4 montly periods and said 25% each month. Assign this to the depreciation book on the asset with a user defined deprecation method. Set a start date only as the end date is obviously determined by the deprecation table you have defined. My asset succesfully depreciated in 4 equal amounts between Jan and April. It is a bit cumbersome is you have a 10 year depreciation as you have to set up 120 lines and there will be some rounding issues. Maybe set up 119 with an equal percentage and an odd line at the first/last period to cancel any difficult decimal. If this isn’t quite what you need, take a look at the way Axapta handles this for some development inspiration!