Asset Management

Asset Management (AM) provides tools to acquire, depreciate, evaluate, and retire assets. The kinds of assets covered are fixed, low value, leased, and real estate.
Low value assets depreciate in the year they are bought and are often aggregated as a single asset master record.
Depreciation often needs to be tracked (for more than one reason), so SAP R/3 enables you to depreciate the same piece of equipment in several parallel ways.
SAP R/3 can represent company structure for AM in several ways. Charts of Depreciation can be at the same organizational level as Charts of Accounts, or depreciation can be a sublevel from Charts of Accounts (as shown in Figure C.5).
Figure C.5. One way a company structure could be set up in AM.
Figure C.6 shows how AM manages an asset through its useful life (the asset's life cycle).
Figure C.6. A typical flow of an Asset through its lifetime.
The main transactions used in AM are Acquisition, Capitalization, Transfer, Depreciation, and Retirement. The main master data includes Chart of Depreciation and Asset Master.
When an asset is acquired, it can be brought into SAP with Create Asset. Asset Management can also transfer cost planning information to Controlling, and Asset Management can produce lists of ordered goods by location or room number to ease taking physical inventory or assets.