Fixed Assets Tax Books???

["David A Parnin" <daparnin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings everyone,

I've got a couple of 4.05CD fixed asset questions.  Our fixed asset taxes
used to be computed by Arthur Andersen but since their demise we have had
to make other arrangements.  Last year the tax people at one of our parent
companies did it with some BPCS data downloaded to Excel spreadsheets.
That's probably what's going to happen this year but we've started working
toward trying to get this set up to manage it in BPCS.  I've worked with
the manufacturing modules of BPCS for years but fixed assets is still new
to me.  Our accounting people are familiar with the financial books of
fixed assets and taxes are new to them.

The problem that we are currently facing is understanding what "The Last
Depreciable Element" is all about in setting up a new tax book for an
asset.  We've read the help text and for a brief moment yesterday I thought
that I might have understood what it was saying.  It made me think that it
wanted the last period of the last year so that it could calculate
backwards to find out when to start depreciating (I think).  I took this to
be the table life in years/periods.  I tried it for our test asset and BPCS
accepted it when it hadn't been accepting anything else that we had tried.
The funny thing is that once I had created the book it would let me edit
that value and make it pretty much anything, even values that hadn't worked
before.  I don't know if that was a bug or a feature.  Today we are trying
to set up books for assets that use tables that don't have an actual life
defined in the depreciation table.  Once again it's not accepting anything
that we try.

My questions are:
1)  Can anybody explain The Last Depreciable Element?
2)  Does the table have to have an actual life defined?
3)  Is it tied to the asset life?
4)  How well does BPCS handle taxes for fixed assets?

Any thoughts and advice are appreciated.

Dave Parnin
Nishikawa Standard Company
Topeka, IN  46571
daparnin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx