Fixed Assets & Lease Accounting (IFRS 16 / ASC 842)

The problem

Most NetSuite finance teams keep two parallel worlds. Fixed assets live in a spreadsheet with a depreciation tab that one person maintains, and leases live in a second spreadsheet that recalculates the right-of-use asset and lease liability every month by hand. Both feed journal entries that get keyed into NetSuite manually. At year end, the auditor asks for the movement schedule, the discount rate applied to each lease, and evidence that the modification in March was remeasured correctly — and the answer takes a week to assemble.

The accounting itself is not the hard part. IFRS 16 and ASC 842 are prescriptive: discount the remaining payments, recognise a liability, recognise a right-of-use asset, unwind interest, amortise the asset, and remeasure when the lease changes. What is hard is doing it consistently across dozens or hundreds of contracts, in the right subsidiary, in the right currency, every single period, with a defensible audit trail. That is a systems problem, and it belongs inside NetSuite.

What ECOSIRE builds

We build this as a set of custom records and SuiteScript 2.1 scripts deployed into your own NetSuite account as an unmanaged bundle or SDF project. Nothing is hidden — you own the source and the objects.

Asset register

A custom record for the asset holds the acquisition source (vendor bill, item receipt, or manual capitalisation), cost, in-service date, useful life, residual value, depreciation method, asset class, subsidiary, department, class, location, and any custom segments you already use for reporting. A User Event script on the vendor bill can propose capitalisation when the line hits an asset-class account, so the register is populated from the source document rather than retyped.

Depreciation methods are implemented as configurable calculation rules — straight line, reducing balance, sum-of-years-digits, and unit-of-production — with a prorate convention you set per asset class. Each asset carries a child schedule record holding one row per period: opening net book value, charge, accumulated depreciation, and closing net book value, generated at creation and regenerated on any change.

Lease register under IFRS 16 and ASC 842

A separate custom record models the lease: commencement date, term, payment schedule and timing, incremental borrowing rate, non-lease components, index-linked escalations, renewal and termination options, and the classification you have concluded (finance or operating under ASC 842; IFRS 16 has a single lessee model). The script builds the amortisation schedule — discounted liability, interest unwind, right-of-use asset amortisation, and the ASC 842 operating-lease single straight-line cost where that classification applies — and stores it as period rows you can inspect line by line.

Modifications, remeasurements, index resets, and early terminations create a new schedule version. The prior version is retained and flagged superseded, so an auditor can see the before, the after, and the catch-up entry between them.

Posting and period close

A Map/Reduce script runs the period charge across the whole register. It groups by subsidiary and posting period, creates summarised or per-asset journal entries against the accounts you map, applies the correct GL segmentation, and writes the resulting internal ID back onto each schedule row so every posted amount traces to its source. Re-running a closed period is blocked; re-running an open one is idempotent and will not double-post.

Disposals, partial disposals, transfers between subsidiaries, revaluations, and impairments each have a dedicated action that computes the gain or loss, closes the remaining schedule, and posts the entry. A Scheduled script can run the whole thing unattended on your close calendar.

Reporting

Saved searches and SuiteAnalytics-ready datasets deliver the asset movement schedule, the lease maturity analysis by undiscounted cash flow bucket, the right-of-use asset roll-forward, the weighted-average remaining lease term and discount rate disclosures, and a reconciliation between the register and the GL control accounts. Roles and permissions restrict who can post versus who can only view.

Who this is for

Finance teams running NetSuite — OneWorld or single-instance — who hold a meaningful asset base or lease portfolio and report under IFRS or US GAAP. It suits organisations with property, vehicle, or equipment leases across multiple subsidiaries and currencies, and any team whose auditors have flagged spreadsheet dependency as a control weakness.

How delivery works

This is a build-to-order application. It does not exist as a finished download; we build your instance of it.

1. Scoping call. We walk your chart of accounts, subsidiary structure, existing asset and lease data, depreciation policies, discount rate methodology, and close calendar. We confirm which standards apply and which classifications you have concluded — we implement your accounting policy, we do not set it. 2. Fixed quote. You receive a written scope, an object list, and a fixed price. No hourly drift. 3. Build. Typical lead time is one working week depending on the number of depreciation methods, lease variations, and integrations in scope. 4. Install in your sandbox. We deploy to your sandbox or Release Preview account first, load a sample of your real assets and leases, and reconcile the generated schedules against your existing spreadsheets line by line until they agree. 5. Production. After you sign off on the sandbox reconciliation, we deploy to production, migrate the opening balances, and run the first period alongside your existing process. 6. Support. A defined post-go-live support window covers defect fixes and configuration questions, with the option to extend.

You receive the SuiteScript source, the SDF project, and the object definitions. If you later want to change a calculation rule yourself, nothing stops you.