Tracking Fixed Asset Maintenance in Dynamics 365 Business Central

During the first nine years of my work experience with Navision and Microsoft Dynamics NAV, (Business Central’s ancestors), I worked for a Microsoft partner with a rental vertical offering. Before clients could utilize the rental functionality, they had to implement the Fixed Asset granule within Navision and NAV. About ninety percent of my first 50 implementations were with rental companies, so I implemented Fixed Assets for almost all my clients.

I left the partner world to join one of my rental clients where we continued to heavily utilize Fixed Assets within NAV. That is when I found the NAV User Group. And then I discovered that many in the NAV user community either did not know there was a Fixed Asset granule in NAV or they were unwilling to replace their spreadsheets with standard NAV functionality.

If you’ve been to a Dynamics community conference or at least looked at the agendas of past events, you know there are always sessions for implementing or utilizing Fixed Assets. Most of these sessions focus on the acquisition costs and the depreciation of the Fixed Assets. But if you are using Business Central and you want to evaluate which Fixed Assets are breaking down on a regular basis or costing you excessive repair bills, the maintenance functionality can provide the data you need.

Maintenance

Let’s see what data is tracked using standard Business Central functionality.

From the Fixed Asset Card, you can track the “Next Service Date” and indicate if the Fixed Asset is currently “Under Maintenance”.

Maintenance Registration

You can also track prior maintenance performed by accessing the Maintenance Registration.

With standard Business Central functionality, the user must manually enter the service history on the Maintenance Registration. I have designed a modification that updates the Maintenance Registration from the Purchase Lines when the Purchase Invoice is posted.

The FA Posting Type Maintenance

While the Maintenance Registration page is a manual process, the Fixed Asset Maintenance Ledger Entries are automatically updated from a Posted Purchase Invoice when the Fixed Asset is entered on the Purchase Invoice using the FA Posting Type “Maintenance”.

You can further define the Maintenance by setting up Maintenance Codes.

Below is a view of the Maintenance Ledger Entries that include the Maintenance Codes. Maintenance Ledger Entries can be easily analyzed for types of Maintenance by clearing the filter from the Fixed Asset you are viewing and sorting all the Maintenance Ledger Entries by Maintenance Code.

Through Business Central version 22.3, users cannot use personalization to add the Maintenance Code field on Purchase Invoice Lines. Microsoft has indicated that in future versions of Business Central, users will be able to personalize most fields. Until that time, your Microsoft partner will have to enable the Maintenance Code field on the Purchase Line if you want to use it.