Are you interested in international accounting standards? If not, then perhaps you should be as both IFRS (international financial reporting standards) and SORP (statement of recommended practice) will have an enormous impact on your asset management systems.
In short, these accounting standards demand that every asset is broken down into its component parts, each of which is then depreciated over different periods of time and to different rules. This change from accounting by scheme, such as a block of flats, to not just unit level but to the components in each unit (such as bathroom fittings), will mean that your asset register will become much, much more complex. For example, the assets at present covered by a 500-line spreadsheet will, under IFRS, require data on hundreds of thousands of separate items.
Excel and other spreadsheets aren’t a solution; quite apart from questions about usability and auditability, most spreadsheets won’t be able to cope with the sheer volume of asset records (for example, Excel is limited to a maximum of around 65,000 rows). The answer is a dedicated asset management system of which there are now many on the market.
