With finance departments being held increasingly accountable for their fixed assets UK wide, and with the ever-changing requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley, IFRS, GAAP  and the Turnbull Guidance (to name but a few), the need for an asset tracking UK wide system has never been greater amongst Commercial and Public Sector organisations alike. Whether in relation to reporting, security or providing an audit trail, organisations have to ensure they remain up-to-date with the current compliancy requirements for their sector.

And there certainly doesn’t seem to be any shortage of information and guidance when it comes to those asset accounting UK standards, nor is there any lack of seemingly endless acronyms:  IFRS, Sarbanes Oxley (Sarox), GAAP, ASB and IASB. Certain types of company or organisation are legally obliged to comply with most, if not all, of these accounting standards and that means having a robust and reliable fixed assets UK system in place.  

In today’s globalised marketplace, the situation is further complicated by the international relationships that many UK companies may have in place. If you are a US company with a listing on the US stock exchange, a UK or European subsidiary of a US listed company or a UK or European company with no division in the USA, but still with listings on the US stock exchange, then you must comply with SOX.

Even if you only have a slight exposure to the US market (e.g. a supplier to a company based in the US) then may well be affected by SOX. If you are a European company with listings on both your own national stock exchange and the US stock exchange, you will find that you are subject to the requirements of both Sarbanes-Oxley and IFRS regulations which dictate that financial statements provide uniformly adequate and transparent information about an organisation’s financial performance for the purpose of international comparison.

Many accounting departments rely on spreadsheets as a well established means of recording results.  They are quick and easy to set up and relatively easy to modify. Simple calculations are easily defined and the spreadsheet is a practical tool for management wanting to make “what-if” projections.However at the level of accounting complexity required by today’s environment, spreadsheets can quickly become complex and difficult to verify. Integrating a spreadsheet with other enterprise systems and tracking asset changes or producing a clear audit trail can also be challenging.

A far better solution is to use dedicated and tailor-made software, particularly for asset register, which is able to control, track and record all the changes that occur within an asset’s lifetime. Real Asset management UK for example has systems that will provide accurate, up-to-date and historical data spanning the entire time from the point from which the asset was entered onto the system to its present state. User-definable fields means that organisations have the freedom to describe things in their internal corporate language and a Windows inspired interface ensures that users can very quickly become adept.

Systems like these save users both time and effort by eliminating the need to manually enter/update each asset and provide a seamless interface with leading general ledger products, thus retaining any prior software investment you may have made. Organisations can choose to consolidate multiple registers for group reporting purposes and so can concurrently maintain discrete financial information. Any number of historic and/or current cost accounting books can be set up to allow different values and currencies to be associated with individual assets and the ability to create fully comprehensive and detailed asset histories makes it far easier, quicker and cheaper to keep track of your physical and IT assets and remain fully compliant.