With the advent of technological solutions, education institutions were enabled to grasp minute data and analytical insights of many aspects. One of these capabilities is the adeptness to perform thorough investigations and understanding of the actual fixed asset performances of the educational institutions. Fixed assets of education centres can span from furniture and fittings to school equipment and vehicles to land and building. They are also known as PPE (Property, Plant and Equipment) which are easily liquidised if the School wants it to be replaced. The importance of managing and monitoring fixed assets of schools cannot be emphasised more because the fixed assets of the School are the physical components that provide comfortable working environments for the students, teachers and all the other stakeholders of a school. Also, having a well-versed understanding of the fixed assets of the School allows the School to optimally utilise their assets to the School’s purposes without wasting or discarding assets half-way through.
What is a Fixed Asset Schedule?
A Fixed Asset Schedule is a computerised accounting scheduling tool that can be integrated into the school’s central system as an asset managing and accounting tool. It will allow your school to keep track of a list of the institution’s fixed assets. Readers often misinterpret a Fixed Asset Schedule to be the same as a Fixed Asset Register- they have common attributes, but they are not the same. Fixed Asset Schedules are more precise and more comprehensive than registers, since it discloses not only asset details but also how it decays and when it must be maintained or salvaged.
Fascinatingly, Fixed Asset Schedules have a full-versed understanding of the asset’s life cycles and actual decaying rates of the assets. It will also estimate when the assets must be maintained or replaced and manage the risks that the organisation might face. This tool unravels all the prior irretrievable data related to the fixed assets’ health. It comprehensively provides insightful data to help the asset managers of the education institutions to apprehend actual performance rates and states of their fixed assets, and allocate wastage-free budgets without mishandling the investments provided by the School’s administration.
How to prepare a Fixed Asset Schedule for your School?
Preparing a Fixed Asset Schedule for your School is typically referred to as a challenging process. But as always, technology mitigates all managerial and operational efforts exerted by your educational institution. Asset Registry will bear comprehensive details of existing assets, such as Insurance Terms, Warranty Periods, Maintenance Protocols, Remaining Asset Lifecycle and Leasing Details. This is an exceptional navigational tool for storing all fixed asset-related information in a centralised database for the convenience of the asset managers. This will result in allowing asset managers and other administrative bodies of the School to understand the reality of the state of their fixed assets and save their time on collecting data through lengthy old-fashioned spreadsheets. These interactive tools have the propensity to allow permitted parties to extract valuable information to prepare the necessary documentation.
Preparing a Fixed Asset Schedule by using your Fixed Asset Registry
To start, you must use your school’s asset directory to create a ‘New Class’. When you click on the ‘New Class’ option, you can proceed to design your depreciation journal by adding the description and the assigned identification code of a fixed asset. You will now have to enter the Input Fields; such as:
- The Current Fiscal Year,
- Useful no. of Years/Months,
- The Salvage Value and
, all related data that was already not mentioned in the registry. The output fields are:
- Total Fixed Asset on cost – it is the sum of all expenses of this Fixed Assets on Cost
- Accumulated Depreciation of the Assets in the Fiscal Year
- Current Book Values of the Assets
- Depreciation amount of the asset by year
- Legal Depreciation Method Rate and more
After all the input and output fields are fed by integrating the registry to other asset maintaining tools, you can create a competent depreciation journal. It can be shared by all the remaining fixed assets to get a clear understanding on how optimally your School is using its fixed assets.
Once the depreciation journal is incorporated your Fixed Asset Schedule is ready for use. Your technicians can design this tool, or your software vendors can do it on your demand. You can ask your vendors to incorporate it with dashboards, buttons, customisable templates to make your schedule user-friendly and fun to use. You can add assets, delete data of discarded assets and save their details in your back-up repositories in case of emergency. Ultimately, you can manage all your education centre’s fixed assets under one glass pane! Any Fixed asset-related data will not be overlooked by you again if you adopt an optimal Fixed Asset Schedule in your school system.
What can a school do by employing a Fixed Asset Schedule?
Managing Fixed Asset Directories
All fixed assets of the institution can be tagged or coded with barcodes or RFID tags and saved in the directories of the School’s systems Asset Management Module. Unlike time-consuming spreadsheets, the Asset Managers of the School can use a centralised cloud-based database to allow flexible navigation of crucial information of the end-to-end fixed assets owned by the institution/s. For example, information of the school bus such as the bus codes, number plates, assigned drivers, scheduled time and routes, lease agreements, insurance information, brake and tire maintenance, salvage value, servicing routines, warranty data, service supplier details and more can be effortlessly extracted by the asset manager.
Manage Maintenance Schedules of Fixed Assets
The Fixed Asset Schedule of the School can use predictive technologies to get hold of information of the asset decaying rates and provide intelligently processed data of the remaining life cycles of the assets. The Fixed Asset Schedule will house tools to schedule maintenance programmes for their assets. These tools Asset Decay Matrices, Asset Health Monitoring Tools, Asset Remaining Lifecycle Monitoring Tools and more. With the integration of such tools, the Fixed Asset Schedule will gain all the necessary information to schedule maintenance programmes to re-service or refurbish school premises without hindering the School’s streamlining operations.
Adding new Fixed Asset information effortlessly
When a new fixed asset enters the School or replaces an existing asset that needs to be discarded, the asset managers can use the Fixed Asset Schedule to update the data without any complication. Since the computerised schedules incorporate user-friendly and register dashboards, interacting with it is made easier and faster for the bookkeepers.
Analytical and Reporting is Mitigated for Budgeting
Once all assets are being recorded, and the deprecation and the number remaining useful life of the fixed assets are extracted from smart analytic tools, the Fixed Asset Schedule serves another most needed purpose. It unlocks useful data required by the decision-makers of the education institution to make company decisions. Such as budgeting for fixed asset replacement and checking for its feasibility without undervaluing or overvaluing the true investment statistics. It also provides needful information for the accounting department of the School to prepare financial accounts and calculate the taxation figures appropriately.
