[Terri Regina]

Hi, everyone:
I recently came across a DGP Fixed Asset Training offering from ONLC. It is a little pricey so I wanted to know if anyone is familiar with the company and if the training is worth the money. If you have any suggestions for Fixed Asset training in DGP (I already use YouTube as a resource, looking for more depth), I would appreciate any and all recommendations. Thank you

——————————
Terri Regina
Schurz Communications, Inc.
Mishawaka IN
——————————

[Thaddeus Suter]

From the lesson plan it looks like a good orientation to the module for a new user and possibly would give you enough information to implement for a couple hundred assets. As far as depth…that’s not likely possible in a one day class. FA can be challenging if you have say 10,000 – 20,000 assets. Things like Account Group IDs, Asset Group IDs, Location and Structure IDs become very valuable as well as some new Smartlist Objects. It all cases, the GP Asset upper limits are around 40,000 assets or less where then you will need to consider a Third Party for depreciation and simply import the GJs. The Depreciation Methods and Averaging Conventions can also be challenging for new users and its very important to define your corporate policy for these so that all the assets in a class are set up consistently and not changed else your depreciation results by asset will be varied. For example some companies will record “place in service” dates as the first or 16th of the period no matter what the actual date was. And mentioning periods, if you have 13 periods in a year or ever need a short period these can be challenging as well even for advanced users.
There is also nice Depreciation Projection tool that does allow you to test and see the results of your setups prior to actually running depreciation and posting the entries. As well as a “single” asset depreciation. This projection feature is oft overlooked.
So in summary the class looks good as an entry level GP FA overview or evaluation process when looking at different FA Products. How useful it will be to you is more dependent on the scope/size of your implementation.

——————————
Thaddeus Suter
Retus, Inc
HELOTES TX
——————————
——————————————-

[Terri Regina]

Thank you, Thaddeus for your thoughts on the ONLC training and the potential issues. I work for a company with several subsidiaries and they are individually maintained “companies” in GP. Is the 40,000 assets limitation for all companies aggregated or is it per company? I have a basic understanding of how to create Class ID’s, Account Groups, enter assets and run reports. I would like to find training that is focused on how the modules communicate with the Sub Ledger and GL so I can troubleshoot the many issues we have. Thank you again for your help.

——————————
Terri Regina
Schurz Communications, Inc.
Mishawaka IN
——————————
——————————————-

[Thaddeus Suter]

That 40,000 limit is more based on your infrastructure. It can be higher in a solid Citrix environment vs fat clients. And it would be per instance as the issue in FA is the processing time it takes to perform the Depreciation Routine. 1-2 hours, 8-9 hours even 2-3 days. can be problematic. Those companies with large Asset counts where they hit these long depreciation routines address it by splitting up the monthly depreciations into smaller groups of assets using Asset Group Ids and depreciating a different Asset Group every day for five days as an example. In these cases, you then want to use a specific FA Login/Userid so that you do not tie up a  regular GP user for hours who has other things to do. In a fat client environment (which I don’t recommend) you can use the Dynamics Process Server (DPS) to remote process your FA Group Depreciations and dramatically shorten the depreciation times approaching a Citrix environment.

As far as FA to GL, The FA Module uses a GL Routine  (after Depreciation is run)  called GL Posting that you select the period or periods that you want to create the GL entries for. It will preview the entries per asset but with 1000s of assets this preview has little value to review, then on Post it creates the appropriate General Ledger journals and send them to a GL Batch so very straight forward.
Two interfaces exist on the payables side. POP for Purchasing of Assets and PM for direct Payables Management creating and updating Assets. I think the GP user manuals are pretty good on these in terms of how they work and they haven’t changed in years.

——————————
Thaddeus Suter
Retus, Inc
HELOTES TX
——————————
——————————————-

[Terri Regina]

Thank you, Thaddeus for the explanation in understandable wording. I appreciate your expertise.

——————————
Terri Regina
Schurz Communications, Inc.
Mishawaka IN
——————————
——————————————-