By Jason Johnson—Co-Founder of Fixed Asset Consulting and Former CEO, Mpulse Maintenance Software

The contemporary business landscape is marked by increasing interconnectivity across diverse operational areas. The gap in the critical intersection of the accounting and maintenance departments is often under-appreciated and overlooked. Acknowledging this vital correlation, Sage, a globally trusted leader in software solutions, has developed an innovative asset maintenance feature as part of the Sage Fixed Assets—Tracking application. 

Unpacking the role of maintenance personnel

Before diving into the specifics of Asset Maintenance, it’s pivotal to understand maintenance professionals’ daily roles and significant contributions. These team members manage an organization’s preventive, corrective, and predictive maintenance tasks. Their duties include extending asset lifespan, averting unnecessary operational downtime, and ensuring smooth, uninterrupted business operations. Maintenance professionals routinely perform checks, servicing, repairs, and even the replacement of equipment.

The importance of maintenance management software

Maintenance management software, or Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) software, is an indispensable tool that helps maintenance departments organize, manage, and track their activities. The software handles work orders, schedules preventive maintenance, and tracks the history of assets and equipment, among other vital functions.

Essential features of comprehensive maintenance management software include:

• Asset management—cataloging all the organization’s assets and maintaining a record of their maintenance history, warranties, and other key details.
• Work order management—facilitating creating, assigning, and tracking work orders.
• Preventive maintenance—enabling the scheduling of routine maintenance tasks to prevent unexpected equipment failures and downtime.
• Reports and analytics-generating detailed reports and insights that guide decision-making.

Introducing Sage Fixed Assets—Tracking Asset Maintenance

With these functionalities in mind, we can delve into Asset Maintenance. It is a fully integrated CMMS solution within the Sage Fixed Asset product suite.

Asset Maintenance incorporates all the core features of a standalone CMMS, while also aligning with standard accounting practices. The ambition of Sage Fixed Assets is to offer a software solution that bridges the gap between maintenance, accounting, and managing fixed assets.

The intersection of accounting and maintenance

From an accounting perspective, understanding the lifecycle of fixed assets, inclusive of maintenance schedules and costs, is indispensable for precise financial reporting and forecasting. Used well, an integrated system such as the Sage Fixed Assets suite of applications for depreciation, tracking, asset maintenance, construction in progress, and reporting promises to achieve one of the “Holy Grails” of asset management. The ability to understand the true total cost of ownership (TCO), while also managing the life cycle of their company assets.

With a consolidated system that melds asset management with maintenance scheduling, Asset Maintenance enables accountants to:

• Amortize costs accurately—real-time tracking of all maintenance activities ensures capitalizable costs associated with each asset are accounted for accurately, resulting in precise depreciation calculations.
• Predict budgets more accurately—gaining insights into maintenance schedules facilitates better budgeting and financial forecasting. Predictable maintenance costs help avert sudden, unexpected expenses.
• Improve asset lifecycle management—insights based on maintenance history can aid the decision-making process concerning asset replacement and avoid unexpected replacement costs.
• Enhance interdepartmental communication—a unified system eliminates data silos, fostering improved communication between maintenance and accounting departments. This results in a more coordinated strategy for managing the organization's fixed assets.

In essence, the Asset Maintenance feature in Sage Fixed Assets—Tracking is more than just a tool for maintenance personnel. It serves as a strategic resource for the entire organization, promoting seamless interdepartmental communication and equipping accounting professionals with real-time, relevant information for efficient financial planning and management.

Stay tuned for a recorded webinar where we’ll dive further into the benefits of collaboration between the accounting and maintenance roles and how the asset maintenance functionality in Sage Fixed Assets—Tracking can help. And please, share it with your maintenance and accounting colleagues!

Ready to unite your accounting and maintenance teams?

Contact the Sage Fixed Assets team at 800-368-2405 and ask them how to get started with Sage Fixed Assets—Tracking.