Understanding the Setup for Life Months

When you set up user-defined depreciation, you specify the life months for the depreciation method. The life months is a value to express the life of the asset. For example, an asset that has a usable life of 5 years and that you depreciate on a 12-month calendar year would have a life month value of 60. Because of changes in the requirements for how assets are depreciated, you might need to convert the life months for an asset to a new value.

You use the Set Up for Life Month program (P75J503) to set up relationships between current life months and the life months to which you must convert the asset. You also specify the effective date of the relationship. The system saves the setup information to the Setup for Life Month table (F75J503). When you run the Assets acquired on or before March 31 - 2007 program (R75J501) or the Assets acquired on or after April 1 - 2007 program (R75J502), the system accesses the F75J503 table to determine the new value that the system writes to the Life Month field (data item ADLM) in the F1202 table. Alternatively, you can use a processing option in the Assets acquired on or before March 31 - 2007 program or the Assets acquired on or after April 1 - 2007 program to specify the new life month value.

You can set up different relationships between one current life month and numerous life months to which you might convert your assets. You use the Life Month Group Code field to differentiate between the relationships that you set up. You use a processing option in the Assets acquired on or before March 31 - 2007 program and Assets acquired on or after April 1 - 2007 program to specify which life month group code to use, and so specify which relationship to use. The combination of the life month group code and current month must be unique because the system uses those values to select the value of the new life month to write to the Asset Account Balances File table (F1012).

For example, you might enter values in the Set Up for Life Month program as shown in this table:

Life Month Group Code	Life Month Before	Life Month After
001	60	120
002	60	72
003	60	48