BNA Software — BNA Fixed Assets Solutions

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. 5

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.

BNA Fixed Assets Solutions includes functions for simplifying the task of applying actions across large amounts of assets, including global and group changes, and mass asset acquisitions and disposals. Other advanced asset life event features include asset sales, retirements, abandonments, like-kind exchange, splitting into multiple new assets, and unlimited asset transfers between departments, cost centers and divisions, while a full-time audit trail is maintained for each depreciation book. When performing consolidations, the program allows users to merge an unlimited number of companies’ assets, including subsidiary units.

BNA Software offers an add-on module for Asset Inventory, providing advanced tools for tracking moveable items such as vehicles, service equipment, furniture, machinery and other assets. The system includes integrated barcode technology that speeds inventory processes, with support for an unlimited number of assets and user-defined fields. BNA Fixed Assets Solutions is updated as necessary by the tax and accounting experts at BNA, who include credentialed CPAs and tax attorneys. 5

Reporting

BNA Fixed Assets Solutions’ library of pre-configured reports include reconciliation-oriented output for accounting, tax, property tax and management functions, and are available in detail and summary view. Reports can be fully customized to user and entity needs, plus users can create custom report output using the built-in Report Maker to select specific data fields for presentation. BNA also offers an optional add-on Report Writer for more advanced configuration and customization using Crystal Reports. Reports can also be output to Excel, PDF, HTML and text formats. The program can generate fileable versions of forms 3468, 4255, 4562, 4626, 4797, 8824, plus Sch. M-1 and M-3, Sec. 179 and FASB 109 projections. 5

Import/Export/Integration

The fixed assets system integrates with the Accounting Inventory and Construction-in-Progress modules, and has an import utility and wizard that can import asset data from Sage FAS, CLR and Thomson Reuters, as well as text-formatted data. It can export into GL formats for ACCPAC, ExecuTrack, Microsoft Dynamics, PeopleSoft, Timberline, CYMA, WolfPak and other programs. It also offers the ability to save to Excel and text, which enables import into most tax and accounting programs. 4.75

Help/Support

BNA Fixed Assets Solutions has an abundance of wizards and other guides that help ensure proper depreciation treatments, as well as several Help functions and an indexed resource. The vendor’s support website provides product documentation, a resource center with white papers and FAQs, and access to online and live training options. Live technical support is included with program pricing. The system can be run on PCs with operating systems up through Windows 7. 4.75

Summary & Pricing

BNA Fixed Assets Solutions offers exceptional depreciation management capabilities, and its global edit and mass asset life event functions make it adept at streamlining the management of large asset bases distributed across multi-tiered organizations. Pricing starts at $1,850 for a single user, with all program updates and technical support included.

2010 Overall Rating 5