การตั้งค่า

Fixed asset setup: locations, groups, useful life and budgets

Where an asset physically sits, the main/sub group it rolls up under, the useful-life policy it inherits, and the capex budget it draws against.

อัปเดตล่าสุด

Who this is for: Manager and Accountant — reading these tabs needs assets.setup.read, changing anything needs assets.setup.manage. Read-only carries assets.setup.read only. Where: Settings → Fixed Assets Setup

Four tabs sit behind this one screen, and together they answer the question every registered asset asks: where does this live, what does it roll up under, how fast does it depreciate, and what capex plan does it draw against?

Tab Holds
Locations Where an asset physically sits — optionally nested, optionally pinned to a real room
Groups The two-level main/sub hierarchy an asset rolls up under, and the defaults it inherits
Useful life The depreciation policies a sub group defaults its assets to
Budgets Capex plans a purchase can be committed against, one period and optionally one group at a time

Register an asset from Accounting → Fixed Assets and it reaches back into all four tabs: its group decides its default GL accounts and useful-life policy, its location says where it is, and its budget — if it has one — is checked and committed in the same transaction the asset is created in.

Locations come first, but only loosely#

A location is a node in a tree — optionally nested under another location, and optionally tied to a real room, so a projector can be pinned to Function Room B rather than just "the location called Function Room B".

  1. Select New location, give it a Name, and optionally a parent location or a room.
  2. Nest as deep as the property's floor plan needs.

Parent and room are set once, at creation, and cannot be changed afterwards. Re-parenting a location that already has children and assets assigned underneath it would silently move all of them; the deliberate fix is to create a new location and reassign — an explicit action, not an implicit side effect.

Groups: two levels, same as billing#

The asset hierarchy takes the identical shape billing's article groups do: a sub group hangs off a main group, and only a sub group is ever assigned to an asset directly. A main group is an organisational row.

Each sub group carries the defaults every asset assigned to it will inherit unless it overrides them individually:

Field What it decides
Default useful life The depreciation policy an asset defaults to
Default asset account The GL account the asset's cost lands on
Default depreciation account The GL account its accumulated depreciation lands on
Default expense account The GL account its monthly depreciation expense lands on

Leave any of the three account fields blank and the group itself falls back to the system defaults — 1500 Fixed Assets, 1590 Accumulated Depreciation and 5200 Depreciation Expense. An individual asset can override its group's default the same way, so the fallback is three levels deep: asset override → group default → system default, resolved fresh on every read — a later change to a group's default reaches every asset that never overrode it, without touching a row.

Groups are never deleted, only deactivated. A deactivated group stops being offered on new assets, and every asset already assigned to it keeps its history exactly as it was.

Useful life: the depreciation policy#

A useful-life policy is one row: a method, a term in years and a residual percentage — the floor the asset never depreciates past.

Field What it is
Group The sub group this policy belongs to — fixed at creation
Method straight_line (even monthly amounts) or declining_balance (a double-declining rate against net book value)
Years The depreciation term
Residual % The percentage of cost the asset is never depreciated below

A policy only ever attaches to a sub group — the same rule a charge code and an asset itself follow. The group is immutable once a policy is created: editing a policy changes its rate for every asset already depreciating under it, but moving it to a different group is not offered — an asset's depreciation history has to stay reproducible against the policy it actually ran under, so a change of group is a new policy, not an edit to this one.

หมายเหตุ

Declining balance derives its own rate. Rather than a fifth column, the rate is 2 / years, applied monthly to the asset's net book value — the standard double-declining convention when only a term is configured.

Budgets: a ceiling nothing silently passes#

A budget is a capex plan for a period — the whole property, or narrowed to one group — with an approved amount. Registering an asset against a budget commits the acquisition cost against it, atomically, in the same transaction that creates the asset.

Field What it is
Name What the plan is for
Group Optional — narrows the budget to one asset group; leave it blank for a property-wide plan
Period Start and end date; end must be after start
Approved amount The ceiling

Remaining is always computed, never stored — approved minus committed, read fresh every time so it can never drift from the two numbers it derives from.

สำคัญ

Going over a budget's remaining amount is refused outright, not merely reported. Registering an asset that would commit more than a budget has left fails the whole request — the asset is not created "over budget with a warning." Raise the approved amount first if the purchase is real. Shrinking an approved amount below what is already committed is refused the same way, for the same reason: the number only means something if nothing has silently passed it.

Who can do what#

Permission Lets you Held by default
assets.setup.read See locations, groups, useful-life policies and budgets Manager, Accountant, Read-only
assets.setup.manage Create and change all four tabs Manager, Accountant
assets.register.read See the Fixed Asset Register, and pick a location/group when registering an asset Manager, Accountant, Read-only
assets.register.manage Register, depreciate and dispose of assets Manager, Accountant

Front Desk and Storekeeper carry neither permission — fixed assets are a financial-controller job, the same split billing setup draws between posting a charge and defining the master it posts against.

What's next#