Asset management
Overview of asset management at the University of Michigan
Role of Financial Operations and the Property Control office
- Financial Operations is responsible for reviewing and adding financial assets greater than $5,000 to the asset management system. They are responsible for all financial transactions involving the assets, including recording the accounting entries to the general ledger, transfer of assets to different organizations, cost adjustments, and recording of monthly depreciation.
- Property Control is responsible for tracking all campus assets valued at $5,000 and over. They are responsible for tagging all financial assets.
Types of assets:
- Financial assets are assets valued at $5,000 and over that are centrally tracked, tagged, capitalized, and depreciated. This includes land, buildings, and equipment.
- Campus assets are assets valued between $1,000 and $5,000. These are not centrally tracked and tagged, and not capitalized or depreciated. Examples include computers, printers, copiers, etc. Each department has the option of manually adding these campus assets into the asset management system on their own.
- Unit assets are assets valued under $1,000 or non-equipment assets. They are not tracked by Financial Operations or Property Control. Furniture is an example of unit assets.
Note: Only financial assets are loaded into the asset management system.
Initiating financial transactions for assets within your organization
Adding new assets to your organization
- Voucher or purchase order: When equipment is purchased using a voucher or purchase order and charged to a specific expense account, the asset will be added to the system upon review.
- Under $5,000: Equipment costing less than $5,000 is not added to the system. Each department has the option of manually adding these assets to the asset management system.
Transferring an asset to a different organization: Contact Financial Operations at amtransfers@umich.edu. They will manually transfer the asset in the system.
LINKS:
The U-M inventory procedure
This is a procedure document on performing a departmental inventory. It includes how an inventory is conducted, the fields used in the actual inventories and some frequently asked questions with answers.
M-Pathways system: Asset management module
The University of Michigan is implementing PeopleSoft across the university. The asset management module is part of the physical resources/financial CPU.
Data warehouse: Asset management
Campus departments will have access to the asset management data warehouse for their reporting needs. Creating ad hoc queries and using the canned queries in business objects are currently the primary ways in which to gather asset management data.
