PLANYC 2030

If you are a US company, or even a company with US connections, you might be required to abide by the Sarbanes Oxley act. If you are an American company and haven’t heard of it before, then you have already learnt something about it. It’s a United States act.

The Sarbanes Oxley is an act that was signed into US in 2002. The act was created to stop what happened to Enron and Worldcom happening to other companies. Both of these companies were found to have been running on fraud for many years. At that current time, the companies weren’t required to show their records to the US government.

What the act does is it makes sure that companies are run legitinately and if it’s found that they are not, it holds the big guns responsible.

The act forces the Chief Executive Officers and the Chief Financial Officers to sign the books for the business. They have to sign to say that the records don’t contain anything untrue and that the records match the company earnings/losses.

If the act is not followed or it turns out the records are incorrect, the Chief Officers can be punished severly.

As I said at the top of the post, you might not have to follow the act. You only need to abide by the act if you company has listings within the US stock exchange and you are based in either the US, UK or Europe. You will also have to abide by the act if your company is based in the UK or Europe and it’s a subsidiary of another US company.

The act can be very annoying for some companies. Because the company must report every transaction that has been made, even the sale and purchase of assets is required. This is where people have the problem because all the company’s fixed assets must before recorded.

The process of fixed asset accounting can be expensive and take time. If you attempt to do the job yourself, based on the size of your company, it can take a number of months and just cause more problems. The most efficient way to get a complete audit of your assets is by hiring an external asset management company to do the job.

Unfortunately, it’s definately not a cheap act to abide by. However, many asset management companies do offer services that they can add to your assets to make it easier and cheaper to audit in the future. Many of the companies also offer Sarbanes Oxley compliance software which will make the job even easier for you.

Hopefully you will now know what the Sarbanes Oxley act is and how you have to abide by it. You probably won’t like having to do it, but you can blame Enron and Worldcom.

We’ve all used them, spreadsheets, whether it’s to do a simple list of items, or whether you are looking to create advanced sums for business forecasts. Although they are not really good enough for our uses, we still manage to put up with them. No doubt this is because they come free with our operating systems and the majority of people prefer to put up with a free one instead of buying a new one.

Although spreadsheets have their downsides, they do have advantages and are useful for a number of uses. The main ones are that they can handle simple calculations, they can create graphics, create business forecasts to see how much money you will lose. They all prove to be useful at some point in time. However, because of the amount of downsides they have, they aren’t useful for tasks like tracking your companies’ UK fixed assets.

Although it may sound appropriate for storing information about your company assets, it’s simply not as advanced as an asset tracking software UK package.

Up until a point, asset management can live with a spreadsheet, however, once you wish to start storing more assets and keeping more data about each item, the spreadsheet quickly becomes useless.

Here is a list of a few features that every asset management software package should contain.

• They are required to store enough in-depth data about your items. Although a standard spreadsheet has the ability to store vasts amount of data, in some cases it may not be sufficient. The data that has been stored may also not be in enough depth for it’s use.

• They must be able to match the complex structure of the company. If the asset can be placed in a number of categories within the company, a simple spreadsheet cannot handle this complex structure.

• They should be flexible enough to restructure easily. As soon as a spreadsheet becomes complex, it’s hard to modifity and data and the structure of it.

• It must be able to cope with calculating several different depreciation levels on different assets. If items were bought at different points in time, for example a computer and a monitor. The software should be capable enough to store individual price depreciation levels.

• The software should be able to do re-lifeing of business assets. If one of your assets is assessed and found to be no longer useless, the levels of depreciation on the item should be changed.

• They must be able to export the data into structured reports. Spreadsheets cannot easily created a structured data report.

Those were just a few of the points that a specifically designed asset management software package must include. Also it’s the reason why a spreadsheet is not good for adding asset data to a fixed asset register.

Worldwide, companies are being pressed by the current recession, so managing your fixed assets UK and getting the most money from them is becoming extremely important. A large number of companies are seeing that asset management is becoming more vital within business as every company attempts to get the most from their business assets.

This need for more efficient asset tracking UK has led to more companies using real time solutions to manage their assets. By knowing the latest information about your assets, you can make informed decisions to avoid making poor deals. It has also led to more companies using asset management services like reliability centered maintenance (RCM) or condition based maintenance (CBM).

RCM is way of avoiding failure of business equipment that could affect the earnings of the company. RCM finds out how the item is used within the company. It then finds out how the equipment can fail and how it would effect the company. Finally, it then looks at how these failures can be avoided.

A study named: “Asset Performance Management: Driving Excellence Though a Reliability Approach in Real Time” has been carried out by the Aberdeen Group. The study looked into companies and ranked them based on a number of different factors, overall equipment effectiveness, unscheduled asset downtime and finally complete and on-time product shipments. The study found that the best companies managed a 89% equipment effectiveness, 97% complete and on time shipments, and finally only 2% unscheduled asset downtime.

The study also found that a range of techniques are used by the top performing companies to make sure they get the most accurate data from their assets. There are a number of different technologies that are used by the best companies. It was discovered that many of the top performers would happily invest money in more advanced methods of asset managment, such as remote asset monitoring.

The different technologies help companies to get thge latest information about their assets to help their company employees. This means that the companies can make decisions based on the information from their assets. It also allows the companies to see how the impact that their assets have on their financial earnings.

The requirement for different methods of asset tracking has led to companies offering different types of asset accouting UK software to help you manage your asset data once you have retrieved it.