Beginning Date Field

Use this book information field in Asset Detail to enter the date through which you have calculated the amounts for beginning YTD depreciation and beginning accumulated depreciation. Enter the date in MM/YYYY format.

The application calculates depreciation for this asset starting from the next month and adds the beginning amounts to the amounts it calculates for future periods. The simplest approach is to enter the end of the last fiscal year as the beginning date and let the application begin calculating depreciation for the new fiscal year. You are required to enter data in these fields only if you are entering an asset on which depreciation was calculated on another system; it is not required for newly acquired assets.

Note: Do not confuse the Beginning Date with the date on which you are entering assets in the application for the first time. For example, if an asset was placed in service on 8/1/06, was depreciated through 12/06, and entered in the application on 5/3/07, the Beginning Date field should be 12/06. The application starts depreciating the asset on 1/1/07. If you were to mistakenly enter 5/07 in the Beginning Date field, you would have zero depreciation in the Beginning Year-to-Date field (because the asset was not yet depreciated in 2007), and the accumulated depreciation through 12/06 would be entered in the Beginning Accumulated field. What would happen is that the application would start calculating depreciation on 6/1/07 and five months of depreciation (1/1/07 through 5/31/07) would be missing!

If you are entering an asset for which you have already computed depreciation, Asset Detail provides three fields - Beginning Date, Beginning Year-to-Date, and Beginning Accumulated - for entering this depreciation information. For more information on how beginning depreciation works, see Beginning Depreciation Fields.