Red Moon Solutions Fixed Assets Manager

From the December 2009 Review of Fixed Asset Management Systems

The Fixed Assets Manager (FAM) system from Red Moon Solutions is a comprehensive asset depreciation and management application that offers broad financial and tax reporting capabilities, extensive tracking options and strong reporting in a flexible and scalable package that is available both as a traditionally installed program or as a hosted solution. The system can support any number of business entities, providing multiple asset schedules and automated calculation of all depreciation methods and conventions, while an audit trail helps maintain the integrity of asset data.

Fixed Assets Manager starts at $1,000 for a single-user stand-alone system that can support up to 1,500 assets with other options available. Red Moon also offers a specialized version of the program that directly integrates with the SAP Business One solution for small and medium enterprise clients, as well as a tool for matching like-kind exchanges and a business intelligence analysis tool.

NAVIGATION/EASE-OF-USE:
The program opens into a crisp and intuitive interface that resembles Microsoft Office products and provides a Windows Explorer navigation menu on the left of the screen, offering expandable selections for asset types, accounting information and directories for each entity whose assets are being managed with the program, with additional access to grouped assets, such as those in a location, division or cost center.

An asset selection screen appears in the main window, with items initially grouped by schedule type, such as ACE, AMT, and Federal tax. But when opening an asset group or viewing the results of an asset search, the screen expands into a columnar spreadsheet list that offers sortable asset summary data, including descriptions, acquisition date, original cost and other information. This spreadsheet view can be customized to display the information that users want in any specific order. Users can also search assets by various other methods and have access to numerous icons at the top of the screen for functions that include additional search functions, navigating through assets and performing calculations.

During company and asset setup, FAM offers several wizards that guide users through these processes, using well-designed data-entry screens that offer intelligent entry features such as selection lists and calendars. Wizards are also available for more advanced tasks, such as asset disposals, data import and reporting. Existing assets can be copied for use as templates, allowing users to quickly enter multiple similar items. The program’s menus and many of its windows can be customized by the user, and an unlimited number of custom fields can be added to asset records for grouping of reports, performing tasks and tracking miscellaneous data. Detailed asset information screens use a tabbed interface that allows users to quickly move between data-entry functions, accounting information and transactions, or bring up a side-by-side comparison of all of an asset’s books. Associated documents and files, such as invoices, maintenance records, spreadsheets and images, can be attached to asset records.

MANAGEMENT FEATURES:
Fixed Assets Manager maintains a record of all asset life and transactional histories that can be easily viewed on asset detail screens, and advanced search capabilities, combined with the ability to add custom data fields, make finding specific assets and running reports across those items easy. FAM supports GAAP, IFRS and Federal depreciation standards, with automatic calculation of depreciation for MACRS, ACRS, straight-line, declining balance, sum of the year’s digits, amortization, zero depreciation and all other typical and historical methods. More than 100 asset types are already built into the program and updated for tax law changes, and users can create additional custom types if desired.