Mandatory Asset on PINV?

Howdy

I am purchasing an item that is marked as a fixed asset in a purchase invoice

linked record…

When I save, I get this error message from the invoice

What I have been able to figure out is this field in the linked Purchase Invoice Item document is not populated with anything

I have looked at the purchase invoice item doctype that this field is not mandatory and I cannot see where it is mandatory either.

Can someone help me understand why erpnext is requiring me to add an asset record on the fly while building a purchase invoice? I realize someone needs to create a fixed asset and setup depreciation, but this should be a separate process/function from purchase. I still need to receive the item, get it into inventory, asset tag it, and put it “into service” before I create a fixed asset and start to depreciate against it.

Thanks

Probably it should not be mandatory (just a warning message) but you can still just create the asset & not submit it, I think depreciation would start only after you submit the asset.

@rmehta The issue of making total number of depreciation mandatory in asset category should also be looked into.In real life there are some fixed assets that are not depreciated like land.Presently in erpnext,that category of the fixed asset cannot be created because of this problem

Unfortunately that is not true. I tried this and I get a message telling me it must be a submitted asset document.

Here is draft asset record:

Here is message received on purchase invoice.

This makes sense as well. Different jurisdictions are going to have different rules on accounting for depreciation. Right now I am simply trying to document a purchase I have made without having to start depreciating an asset I don’t even have possession of yet.

Maybe the validation has changed, however no accounting entries would be created on submitting the asset. The accounting entries get created only when you click on the “Make Depreciation Entry” and depends on the next depreciation date. So you could work around temporarily using this, however I agree with you that the business flow is not optimal.

Thank @Pawan

I found out another option as well. On a whim I tried starting with a full purchase order → purchase invoice process instead of just going straight to the purchase invoice. When I went this route, the PINV did not prompt me to create asset entries. I think somewhere in code erp understood that since I went through a PO and had no purchase receipts that there was no asset to create.

So that works for me. Might want to document this behavior somewhere. All of our purchases to date have been for services and other non-assets so going the PINV → PE route is short and sweet. Seems like for asset purchases you need to go through a bit more hoops, which is actually fine because there is a lot more control needed there.

I am coming back to this conversation and recalled something you said (quoted). So does ERP not automatically create the depreciation entries via a scheduled job? Does a human have to go into each asset and hit that button for every month? My business is capital (asset) heavy, so we are going to have a large amount of manual depreciation entries every month?

Thanks

There is a scheduled process also that would do this based on next depreciation date set

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