What Are Fixed Assets?

Fixed assets are referred to as assets that have a long and useful life span. They are specifically acquired for long-term use. And the software that are used to manage these assets are called fixed assets software.

Common Categories of Fixed Assets

As far as the businesses are concerned, they use many kinds of assets to run their operations. These assets are normally categorized into the following main categories.

However, the manageable parameters for each asset category are their purchase cost, life cycle, selling.

Buildings

This category includes the management of buildings, workplaces or any other enclosed region for official use.

Land

The land is the only category in the assets that have no depreciation element. This category is different from the building category. It remains useful for an indefinite amount of time. Besides, the cost that organizations invest to prepare land is also a part of this category.

IT Tools

IT equipment category, as the name suggests, refers to a diverse range of computing devices. Such equipment includes computer systems, network devices, etc. Moreover, it also involves software solutions that organizations use to manage their data.

Furniture & Fixtures

All the workplace furniture and fixtures that the organization uses and don’t sell them for a longer period of time. Such assets are storage shelves, benches, desks, cubicles, cupboards and chairs etc.

Fixed assets are not limited only to the previously mentioned categories. They may also include several other categories depending upon the business nature.

Now the point is, how do organizations have been managing these assets classically? Let’s read below.

Common challenges

Classical methods of fixed asset management involve the usage of spreadsheets and hardcopy documents. These methods often catch errors and mishandling while record keeping. Let’s discuss these challenges in detail below.

Lengthy paper trails

Adding and updating assets records on the paper sheets are extremely tiresome and complicated. And with this inefficient approach, it is hard to quickly find and track the asset from a long paper register.

Inconsistent records

On-premises spreadsheets are not the solution; especially for a multi-branched organization. The absence of centralization leads to inconsistent records. However, errors like redundancy or incomplete information may occur across several copies of one file. Hence, the records would be imbalanced.

Lower productivity

Not being able to schedule assets for proper and timely management leads to their lower productivity. You might find an asset at a point where it’s no longer workable. But it could be maintained if analyzed before its alarming condition.

Stock Imbalance

Would you be able to efficiently manage the stock of assets on papers and old spreadsheet? Such approach leads to hurdles like boring and time-consuming tracing of the assets. This directly impacts the demand of forecasting which results into disproportionate stock levels. This furthers develops challenges for asset reporting due to untracked usage.

All these above hurdles need a proper solution for an organization to run smoothly.

What’s that solution? Find it below!

Solution

In order to prevent your organization from facing costly troubles, you need to implement fixed asset management software. Such software solutions come in both on-premises and cloud platforms. However, cloud-based software is always recommended to achieve centralization.

A perfect example of such software is SMACC. This is a well-known software for asset management. It is used and praised by thousands of professionals. It has a wide range of amazing features that allow you to:

• See an all-round-view of assets
• Release burden of maintaining physical records
• Digitally manage assets on a cloud platform
• Simplify asset tracking and monitoring
• Easily access data with centralized approach
• Secure assets management via authorized access
• Easily understand the process of calculating asset depreciation
• Audit all asset transactions with complete history
• Utilize pre-defined templates for asset reporting, listing
• Analyze business performance by checking assets timely
• Ultimately, boost the overall performance of business
• Extract useful information and forecast smart decisions with detailed reports

Aren’t these features amazing? Thus, it is an imperative decision to implement fully-featured fixed assets software to smooth your business.

Well, in general, it is important for every organization to automate the fixed assets management. Moreover, they need critical depreciation management. As they get often subjected to wear and during their usage. This factor makes them progressively worse. Hence, useless at all. This is why it is important to have a well-managed record of the assets.