Managing Fixed Assets

Prosaic’s Fixed Assets register tracks assets from purchase through depreciation and disposal. It keeps each asset’s book value, associated journals and history together, so you can review both the register and its accounting entries from one place.

If you’re setting up Fixed Assets for the first time, start with the Fixed Assets Quick Start Guide. This article covers the individual fields, depreciation workflow, corrections and lifecycle rules in more detail.

In this article

• Asset lifecycle, methods and fields
• Adding and activating assets
• Running and rolling back depreciation
• Using the register, bulk actions and exports
• Disposing of and deleting assets

Before you start: set up asset types

Every fixed asset needs an asset type. The type supplies the default depreciation settings and the accounts Prosaic uses for purchase, depreciation and disposal journals.

You can create workspace asset types for reuse across entities that share your chart templates, or create a type for one entity. Read Setting Up Asset Types for account requirements, workspace behaviour and rules for editing types that are already in use.

Asset lifecycle, methods and fields

Asset lifecycle

Each asset moves through three visible states:

1. Draft: the asset can be edited freely and has no accounting effect.
2. Active: the asset can be depreciated, rolled back, disposed of or deleted. Its accounting values are locked, but you can still edit its name, asset number and description.
3. Disposed: the asset has been sold or written off and has a disposal journal. This is a final state, so the asset can’t be edited or deleted.

Depreciation methods

• Straight Line: applies the same depreciation amount each month until the asset reaches its residual value.
• Diminishing Value: uses the remaining depreciable value at the start of each financial year. The monthly amount is consistent within that financial year and reduces in later years.
• No depreciation: keeps the asset in the register without calculating depreciation. These assets are skipped when you run depreciation in bulk.

For Straight Line and Diminishing Value, calculate depreciation using either a Depreciation Rate or a Useful Life. Enter one, not both.

Important asset fields

• Purchase Date records when the asset was acquired. Start Date controls the first month available for depreciation.
• Purchase Price is the asset’s historical cost. Cost Limit optionally caps the amount used for depreciation without changing that historical cost.
• Residual Value is the floor that depreciation won’t reduce the asset below.
• Opening Accumulated Depreciation records depreciation from before the asset entered Prosaic. It appears when the depreciation start date is later than the purchase date.
• Business Use Percentage splits depreciation between the depreciation expense and private-use accounts. A private-use account must be configured on the asset type before you can enter less than 100%.

Immediate expense claim

For a depreciable asset, the Immediate Expense Claim field offers 0% or 20%. If you select 20%, Prosaic posts the immediate-expense journal when the asset is activated and depreciates the remaining cost base.

The 20% option can be used for New Zealand’s Investment Boost. Eligibility depends on the asset and when it became available for use, so check IRD’s Investment Boost requirements before claiming it.

Adding and activating assets

Three ways to add assets

Manual entry: go to Fixed Assets and click Create fixed asset. Select the entity and asset type, enter the purchase details, then review the inherited depreciation settings.

Bank reconciliation: when you reconcile a purchase to a fixed asset account, Prosaic creates a draft asset using the transaction’s date, amount and description. If the account has a matching asset type, that type is selected automatically. The source transaction remains linked from the asset page.

CSV import: click Import to upload a Xero fixed asset register or use Prosaic’s CSV template. Imports create drafts for one entity, with up to 1,000 assets per file. Review the result for skipped rows or warnings before activating anything.

Reviewing a draft

Draft assets don’t affect the ledger. You can change their entity, asset type, dates, values and depreciation settings until they’re ready.

For several drafts, select them in the register and use Bulk actions → Edit. Bulk editing can update the asset type, depreciation method, rate, useful life or immediate-expense percentage. Each enabled field is applied only to the selected drafts.

Activating an asset

Activation locks the accounting values and makes a depreciable asset eligible for depreciation. You can activate one asset from its Actions menu or activate several valid drafts through Bulk actions → Activate.

For a manually entered purchase that isn’t already in the ledger, turn on Create Purchase Journal before activation. Prosaic posts the purchase journal and links it to the asset. If the asset came from a reconciled bank transaction, or its opening balances were imported separately, don’t create another purchase journal.

Once active, use Edit details to change the name, asset number or description. Purchase values, dates, asset type and depreciation settings remain locked because they drive the asset’s journals.

Running and rolling back depreciation

Running depreciation

You can run depreciation for one active asset from its Actions menu, or select several active assets and choose Bulk actions → Run depreciation.

1. For the first run, choose the From month. It defaults to the asset’s depreciation start month.
2. Choose the month to run Up to and including. Available months run through the current calendar month.
3. Review the assets included, then click Run Depreciation.

Prosaic processes every unrecorded month in the range, including months across financial-year boundaries. Each monthly journal is dated on the last day of that month and posted automatically. Later runs continue from the month after the most recent run.

The register and asset page then show the updated accumulated depreciation, current book value and Depreciated Until month. Depreciation stops when the asset reaches its residual value.

Rolling back depreciation

To correct a depreciation run, open the active asset and choose Actions → Rollback depreciation. You can also use Rollback beside a posted depreciation journal.

1. Select the earliest month you want to reverse.
2. Review the range shown. Prosaic reverses the selected month and every later depreciation run for that asset.
3. If the rollback reaches a prior financial year, acknowledge the reporting warning.
4. Click Rollback.

The original journals remain visible as reversed, the book value is restored, and the rollback is recorded in the asset’s history. You can then rerun depreciation for the required months. If the asset’s locked values or depreciation settings are wrong, delete and recreate the asset with the correct details.

Using the register, bulk actions and exports

The Fixed Assets register works across the workspace. Use search plus the entity, status and asset-type filters to narrow the view. You can sort the columns, choose which columns are visible and retain useful views while working through a client.

Select rows to use the available bulk actions:

• Edit or Activate selected drafts.
• Run depreciation for selected active, depreciable assets.
• Delete selected draft or active assets.

The Export menu downloads the current register view as CSV, PDF or Excel. Search and entity, status and asset-type filters are included in the export, making it useful for client workpapers and review.

Open an asset to see its current book value, accumulated depreciation and latest depreciation month. The Journals section links to purchase, immediate-expense, depreciation and disposal journals. The History section records creation, updates, activation, depreciation, rollback, disposal and deletion activity.

Disposing of and deleting assets

Disposing of an asset

Use disposal when an active asset is sold, scrapped or written off.

1. Open the asset and choose Actions → Dispose.
2. Enter the disposal proceeds and disposal date.
3. Review the generated journal lines, accounts and tax rates. You can edit the journal or add a balancing line where needed.
4. Click Dispose Asset.

Prosaic calculates the gain or loss using the asset’s current book value and creates a draft disposal journal. Where proceeds exceed original cost, the form identifies depreciation recovery and capital gain lines for review. Review and post the draft journal through Journals.

Deleting an asset

Draft assets can be deleted without an accounting impact.

Active assets can also be deleted. Prosaic reverses associated purchase, immediate-expense and depreciation journals, removes the depreciation runs and removes the asset from the register. A source bank transaction is not changed.

If an active asset may contain prior-year depreciation, Prosaic shows an additional reporting warning that you must acknowledge. Deletion can affect previously reported figures and can’t be undone.

Disposed assets can’t be deleted. Their disposal journal and history remain part of the audit trail.

Need help?

If an asset’s register value doesn’t agree with the ledger, check its purchase, immediate-expense, depreciation and disposal journals first. For a migrated asset, also confirm that the opening journal and Opening Accumulated Depreciation represent the same conversion date.

Use the 💬 button in Prosaic or email help@prosaic.works if you need help tracing the difference.