Overview of Capital Asset Costs

Track capital project costs, such as asset and retirement costs, using Oracle Fusion Project Costing. You can also create asset cost allocation methods and specify capitalization options for your projects.

What's the difference between project assets and Oracle Assets assets?

Oracle Assets assets represent actual assets in an organization. These are assets that get reported in the Fixed Assets section of the organization's balance sheet. Oracle Assets enables you to manage these assets and depreciate them over time.

Note: These assets will also include accumulated depreciation, which will allow you to determine the net book value of all your assets.

For example, there may be a line item on the balance sheet named Buildings. This would be a grouped listing of the cost of all buildings owned by your company. So, your company might report, say, $200,000,000 worth of buildings; Oracle Assets provides costing details for these, say, 175 buildings, which make up that summary cost.

It is important to note that not all assets that are listed in Oracle Assets are associated with projects. There are many assets that are directly purchased for the use of the organization, or acquired when an organization buys out another. Oracle Assets helps you manage all your assets, regardless of whether they were created using Oracle Projects or purchased directly from other applications, such as Oracle Payables.

A project asset, on the other hand, is a placeholder for accumulating all project costs that went into creating an asset. Now, when the project is completed, and all asset costs have been captured, the project asset records all the costs that went into creating it. Oracle Assets doesn't need that kind of detail; it just wants to know how much an asset cost in the end. Even after the project is over, you can enhance the asset and assign costs to it.

Projects creates accounting for construction-in-progress (CIP) assets, and Oracle Assets moves the CIP cost into a final asset account.

Why do you need Oracle Projects to create assets?

You need Oracle Projects to create assets only when you can't buy the asset outright and need to construct / assemble the asset from scratch. Oracle Projects helps you capture the costs that went into creating the asset, so these can be reviewed / audited whenever required. Oracle Assets doesn't capture that level of detail and is only concerned about the final cost of an asset. For example, Oracle Time and Labor doesn't send any data directly to Oracle Assets. Oracle Time and Labor sends time cards to Oracle Projects, which then groups them together and allocates them to assets.