Asset Transfer

Asset transfer is a complex process and should not be entered into lightly, if your customer business is bit complex in nature. The complexity varies from companies to companies along with industry type.This post will briefly tells about Asset Transfer functionality of Oracle.

You may have three main business scenario's within Asset Transfer.

1. Location Transfer without ownership change
2. Location Transfer with ownership change
3. Ownership Transfer without location change

In reality 1,2 is sort of intra Transfer of asset where as #3 is consider as Inter Transfer. Lets take a detail understanding what is meant and see key difference:

 Transfer Intra Entity

Assets are sometimes transferred between locations within the same entity. These are referred to as INTRA Entity transfers as opposed to INTER Entity transfers where the asset transfers between two entities.

Companies have requirement , when an asset is transferred Intra Entity the location of the asset changes. It is therefore necessary that those changes are identified and recorded in the Fixed Assets module for controlling the physical location of the asset.

Oracle Navigation

Navigation -> Assets -> Asset workbench -> Assignments

You can use Find Assets form to make a transfer of a particular asset.

 Asset Transfers -Process

(N) Assets > Asset Workbench (B) Assignments

To get use of Intra Entity transfer which might be location change , you can transfer assets between employees, depreciation expense accounts, and locations. These are some of key things which you need to have a clarity:

• You can change the transfer date to a date in a prior period for a particular transfer, but the transfer must occur within the current fiscal year
• You can change the transfer date of an asset to a prior period only once per asset.
• Oracle does not allow you to transfer an asset to a future period.
• Oracle does not transfer an asset after its normal life is completed.
• In the Unit Change field of the Assignments window, enter a negative number for the assignment line from which you want to transfer the asset. Enter a positive number if you want to add units to existing assignments or create new assignments. Only one negative line is allowed per transaction.
• A journal entry is created as soon as an asset is transferred from one Depreciation Expense Account to another.

 Transfers - Inter Entity

In reality , Oracle Asset does not have a facility to transfer assets from one corporate book to another. For the purpose of understanding you can consider corporate book to be synonymous with legal entity. In order to transfer assets from one legal entity to another it is necessary to retire the asset in one corporate book and add it to the other corporate book.

In EBS, there is no standard functionality/process in FA for transfer assets Inter Entity.

The work around for handling such scenarios consist of 2 simple steps.

1) In Entity book(s)1 you need to adjust Current Cost = 0, retire the assets.
This will reverse all accumulated depreciation and have no gain/loss on the retirements passed to GL.

2) Add the assets to the new book(s)(entity 2) via FA_MASS_ADDITIONS or the Addition API.

Here you probably do not want to add with DEPRN_RESERVE values - just let FA re-establish the balances when you run depreciation and create JEs > GL.

How Transfer works

A tranfer is recorded as such in the FA_TRANSACTION_HEADERS table. The old and the new line is shown in the FA_DISTRIBUTION_HISTORY table and the journal lines are shown in FA_ADJUSTMENTS after depreciation is run. In FA_DEPRN_DETAIL you see a row with the old distribution_id and the new distribution_id in the period_counter of the transfer.

 Asset Transfer API

You can get use the Oracle Transfer API's to add assets directly by writing a PL/SQL based driven program . The Transfer API FA_TRANSFER_PUB.DO_TRANSFER can be used .

 Scenarios in Intra entity Transfer - Asset Accounting

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