Image via WikipediaWhen you’re assessing your company’s balance sheet and inventory it’s important to have the best fixed asset depreciation and tracking software that’s available. Finding out how much your equipment and property is worth is going to help limit your tax and insurance liability. Depreciation is a fact of life, as your assets age they are worth less in the resale and second user market meaning that as soon as you plug it in it’s worth less than you paid for it. As each year passes the goods are worth less therefore your tax liability in turn goes down. As many as 65% of companies misrepresent the value of their assets, paying tax on goods which would essentially be worth nothing on the resale market. 30% have such poor auditing and asset tracking that they are paying for ‘ghost’ items, that is property the company no longer owns but which still appears on the balance sheets and ledgers.
Inventory management software and barcode tracking systems offer effective depreciation and fixed asset management schedules which can alert you when items need servicing, licenses renewing and when hardware needs replacing due to superannuation as well as letting you audit your entire company so that your ledger is 100% accurate and up to date. With barcoding assets can be assigned to a particular room, corridor, floor or building meaning that if they are moved or go missing they can easily be accounted for. And written out rather that kept in ledgers.
Introducing asset tracking software can have a number of other benefits for your business not limited to:
Saving money insuring ‘ghost’ assets which remain on the books
Saving money on tax as you won’t miss depreciation deductions including Bonus Depreciation
Saving your time by making assets ‘swipable’ with a barcode reader which will provide your audit data in milliseconds
Asset management software is generally compatible with Sage and most of the other accountancy software and firmware as well as being able to produce reports in Excel, XML or HTML. The result is that a process such as auditing, which would have taken an age can now be done in a fraction of the time.
Of course the barcode can provide you with all sorts of other data too, not necessarily concerned with auditing, you can keep information such as date of purchase and service schedule, make and model number should you need spares, vendor contact information and maintenance records and who the property is assigned to within the company. When you need to find out about an asset, a room, corridor floor or building all you need to do is look it up. You can search for an ID, manufacturer, vendor, service engineer or date.
With all this data so easily accessed reporting and auditing for tax and account purposes as well as identifying lost, damaged and otherwise exempt hardware is simple.
Dan Cash is a features writer currently looking into inventory management facilities and depreciation software.
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