Hello, J Johnston,

Your auditor's finding that the SFA software changed the estimated life on your asset records during the Custom Import is incorrect.  During the Custom Import, whatever values were contained in your spreadsheet were copied into the field to which they were mapped subject, of course, to formatting and other rules.  And if those rules were violated, you would have been alerted through the Exceptions Report.

Yet, it is clear from your post that you have now discovered asset records with wrong values in the Estimated Life field, and that would indeed cause depreciation "to be off," as you put it.  The critical question you're facing is how can this be fixed?

One option is edit each asset record individually.  And when you change a critical field, like the Estimated Life field, you will be prompted to choose the effective date on which you want to make the change effective.  In the dialog window, you can also choose to recalculate depreciation.  If these are new assets, you may elect to recalculate from the Placed-In-Service date.  If you imported these assets with Beginning field information, you will want to recalculate from the Beginning Date.

If you must edit multiple assets, you may prefer to use the Bulk Edit feature where you can apply these estimated life changes to groups of assets, and it's possible this procedure may save you some time over editing each record individually.

If you have graduated from the Intermediate Depreciation class offered through Sage U, then you already possess the skill set to perform the corrective actions I have described, along with many other skills including the Custom Import.

If, however, you are untrained on how to use the SFA software, there is another option available to you.  A consultant from the Sage Expert Services team can be hired to do this work for you.  Contact your Sage account rep to pursue this option.