BNA Software — BNA Fixed Assets Solutions

BNA Software — BNA Fixed Assets Solutions
800-424-2938
www.bnasoftware.com

From the December 2010 Review of Fixed Asset Management Systems

 BNA Software offers an array of professional programs for income tax planning, tax analysis, wealth management, estate and gift tax planning and compliance, and sales and use tax. BNA Fixed Assets Solutions is designed for in-house and public tax and accounting professionals, providing automated asset management, inventory and tracking functions, with comprehensive depreciation calculations and support for all traditional and custom treatments and conventions. The program is offered as an installed system (reviewed here) and also as a web-based application.

BASIC SYSTEM FUNCTIONS:
BNA Fixed Assets Solutions guides users through initial setup of entities, with the ability to use templates for automatically creating defaults for asset types, books, queries and reports. Users can create custom project lists, tailor asset fields to specific data and customize books and asset types. Company selection is performed from a Windows Explorer menu, which has limited search and filtering options. But aside from that, the program provides outstanding interfaces and navigation. The primary interface also offers pull-down menus for core system functions, as well as tabbed access to assets, books, reports, export functions, queries, asset types, fields and construction-in-progress features.

Asset selection screens offer great detail in a spreadsheet format with the ability to sort by columnar data and customize the columns that appear. They also offer buttons for quickly accessing features such as adding new assets or duplicating existing ones, as well as for performing disposals, splits, transfers and queries. In addition to options for importing asset and company data from other systems or documents, users have three methods of manual data entry, including a wizard, an express entry worksheet and a single asset entry window. With the wizard and express views, users can perform mass acquisition/entry, helping to speed entry tasks. In all, the program offers more than 30 wizards for guiding users through processes.

Asset information screens provide tabs for moving between general information, transfer data, balance/accumulated depreciation, depreciation expenses, and the ability to add images or documents to asset records. The summary tab provides a side-by-side display of all books, with drilldown access to underlying information for depreciation, net book value, Net Sec. 179, additional first year depreciation and other data worksheets, which when edited, automatically calculate and are reflected on the asset summary screens, books and in any reporting output. BNA Fixed Assets Solutions can support any number of entities and subsidiary departments with up to 10,000 assets each. It can be accessed simultaneously by any number of licensed users and offers user-level security options.

CORE ASSET MANAGEMENT FEATURES:
BNA Fixed Assets Solutions is impressive, providing automatic calculation of GAAP, federal tax, AMT, ACE, E&P and up to 99 customized depreciation books, with built-in rules for ACRS, MACRS, sum-of-years’ digits, straight-line and other depreciation methods. It supports up to 200 short tax years. During asset setup, the program assists the user in selecting appropriate methods and treatments based on property types and class, with features for properly managing the assets of regular, farm, Indian reservation, Indian farm and government entities. The system includes customizable fields and book-specific fields. Analysis features include a data validation engine that helps ensure compliance with tax code and GAAP by notifying users of potential data errors and conflicts.