Comprehensive Fixed Asset Management

Essex Fire Authority approached FMIS looking for a comprehensive Fixed Asset Management solution. The Essex County Fire and Rescue Service manages an extensive asset register including the usual office and IT equipment as well as highly specialised equipment. Most importantly they manage a large number of land and building assets, all of which need to be stored at a detailed component level.

Following a comprehensive review of the market, the authority chose FMIS. Sandra Ruben, Finance Manager for Essex Fire Authority explains their decision, “FMIS gives us the ability to structure our assets in the way we need so that individual components can be easily valued and reported on.”

Component Accounting

One of the challenges for the authority in effectively managing their asset register was the complex structure of many of their fixed assets. Any solution would need to be able to identify parent and child assets allowing them to be allocated different useful economic lifespans. With FMIS, linked assets can be grouped together easily or reported on and managed individually.

Minimum Revenue Provision (MRP)

Local authorities are required to set aside some of their revenues each year as a provision in respect of capital expenditure financed by borrowing. This provision is known as the Minimum Revenue Provision (MRP). Using FMIS Fixed Assets, the Essex Fire Authority uses the historic depreciation method to calculate the MRP charged to the revenue account.

Sandra describes how FMIS Fixed Assets has improved the accuracy of forecasting and saved the authority time in this area. “The System allows for a current and historic set of values to be stored. This has enabled us to calculate and forecast our MRP charge more accurately. Being able to forecast the MRP charge is very useful as we can see immediately the future impact on the revenue account of any capital expenditure. We can now run historic depreciation reports for a range of years at the touch of a button rather than having to make lengthy manual calculations. This has saved a significant amount of time.”

Revaluation and impairment of Assets

Revaluation and impairment used to be a time-consuming manual exercise for the authority. FMIS Fixed Assets streamlines the process, creating a report that allows the authority to quickly identify the accumulated impairment and revaluation values held against each asset.

Following the revaluation/impairment exercise, any changes can be easily imported straight back into the FMIS system via a spreadsheet importer.

Reports

Flexible and simple reporting is an important feature for the authority. According to Sandra, “the suite of reports that come as standard with the Fixed Asset System are very easy to run. The option to group reports enables you to customise your reports with ease.”
The system comes with an extensive range of summary and detailed reports with flexible coding structures. Reports are available for finance and non-finance users and can be easily exported to PDF or Excel.