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Solution · Finance & accountingThe machine starts producing and starts depreciating in the same month
Capital projects that reach the asset register on time
A settlement request from the project owner sets robots to collect the project costs, propose the asset split and post the settlement in SAP, so depreciation starts on the right date.
Executive summary
Your newest production line is earning money and your books still call it a project.
The trigger is a person, not a schedule.
Capitalisation happens in the month the machine is accepted, so depreciation starts from the date the standard points at.
SAP S/4HANA asset accounting and project system; the SharePoint evidence library; the Power BI capital spend model
Business problem
Fixed assets
Every investment lives two lives. On the shop floor it is a project with a plan, a budget and an acceptance date; in the ledger it is a cost collector gathering purchase orders, goods receipts and internal hours until somebody declares it finished. That declaration is the whole problem: a business event, made by the person who accepted the machine, that has to reach an accountant who was not in the room.
Usually it does not, or not quickly. The project owner's work ends when the line makes good product, and the paperwork after that is the least interesting part of his week. The protocol is signed and filed with the project documents; nothing in SAP moves, because nothing in SAP is watching. Asset accounting finds out on the quarterly report, or when the auditor asks why a line worth €1.4m has been open for two years.
At scale the delay stops being administrative. Assets under construction are not depreciated, so a group that settles late carries cost where it should carry a charge, and its capital expenditure report cannot be reconciled with the plan the board approved. The insurance schedule and the maintenance masters inherit the same delay.
How it works today
This is the shape of capitalisation wherever projects are run by engineers and settled by accountants.
- PersonThe project owner accepts the machine, signs the handover protocol and files it with the project documents
- WaitingAsset accounting hears about it when someone mentions it, typically one to five months later
- PersonThe accountant pulls the WBS cost report, exports two hundred lines to Excel and decides what belongs to the machine, what to the building and what is not capitalisable
- PersonThe split, the useful lives and the acceptance date are then agreed by email with an owner who answers in three days
- SystemAsset masters are created one at a time, then the assets under construction are settled with whatever asset value date the accountant believes is right
- Risk of errorNothing reconciles what stays open: the quarterly list runs to ninety lines and the oldest entries predate the current controller
- WaitingDepreciation on equipment already producing starts in the month the paperwork was finished, not the month of acceptance
Why the current process costs more than it appears
The cost grows where nobody is looking.
- Assembling one settlement is research, not bookkeeping. Somebody reads two hundred cost lines, opens goods receipts to see what was delivered, and asks an engineer what a line called "installation works" covers before keying anything.
- Depreciation that starts late does not correct itself quietly. The charge missed in one year turns up in a later one, and planned and actual capital spend end up describing different things.
- Assets under construction become where decisions are postponed. A line nobody wants to argue about carries forward and is written off at year-end under deadline pressure, the worst moment to judge a useful life.
- Everything about the split lives with one person. Which cost element belongs to which asset class, which supplier line is a spare part and which is the machine: ask, and the answer is a name, not a document.
Cost of inaction
Late capitalisation sets off no alarm. The plant produces, the supplier is paid, the project folder closes, and the only thing disagreeing with the shop floor is a register nobody reads between audits. That is why the first two rows survive every review: two and a half hours, twenty-seven times a month, under no cost code called capitalisation.
The third row is arithmetic on the scenario, not cash leaving the company. Take €12m of the €40m plan reaching the register three months late on average; at a ten-year useful life that is €12m × 10% × 3/12, so about €300,000 of depreciation charge lands in a later period than the one it belongs to. It reverses in time, which is why it is easy to live with, and what the auditor asks when an asset under construction turns two.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
A manufacturing group with three plants in Poland and Germany, SAP S/4HANA with asset accounting and the project system, Microsoft 365 E3; the capital plan is about €40m a year and asset accounting sits in a shared-service centre with one senior accountant and a deputy.
Around 320 settlements, transfers and disposals a year, roughly 27 a month, producing about 190 new asset masters; assets under construction average €6.2m, part of it equipment already producing.
The owner signs the protocol and files it, the accountant discovers the event later, rebuilds the cost split in Excel, agrees it by email and posts the settlement asset master by asset master.
About two and a half hours per settlement once the case reaches finance, and a lag of one to five months before it does, so the register describes the plants as they were.
The owner raises a settlement request in Microsoft Teams; robots collect the project's cost lines, goods receipts and commitments from SAP, propose the asset split, useful lives and capitalisation date from the rules table, and route one approval to the accountant and the owner.
In the modelled case capitalisation happens in the month of acceptance rather than one to five months later, two and a half hours become an approval, and every open asset under construction carries an owner and an age. The figures are a model of this scenario, not a client measurement.
Proposed solution
The trigger is a person, not a schedule. When a machine is accepted, the project owner opens the Microsoft Forms settlement request in the project's Teams channel: which project, the date it became available for use, where the protocol is. Power Automate validates the response, files the protocol on SharePoint and writes the request into a list that UiPath watches.
What follows is deterministic. A robot reads the WBS element's cost lines, the goods receipts behind them and the commitments still open, then applies the group rules table: cost element to asset class, class to useful life and depreciation key, acceptance date to capitalisation date. Lines it cannot map are marked rather than guessed, and the result is one proposed row per asset with its cost lines behind it.
The approval is one task, not a thread. The accountant and the project owner receive the same Action Center task inside Microsoft Teams: proposed assets, unmapped lines, depreciation start date. Once both have acted, the robot creates the asset masters, settles the assets under construction with the asset value date from the protocol and files the evidence pack. Transfers and disposals travel the same path, and a monthly watchdog lists every asset under construction over the threshold with its owner's name.
Microsoft Forms with the Power Automate response trigger; UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers, credential store and audit; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint and Microsoft Teams; UiPath Action Center tasks as actionable notifications in Teams; SAP OData and SAP BAPI connectors with UiPath SAP WinGUI activities; the Teams Approvals app; Power BI in a channel tab
The request form and its validation, the settlement register, the rules table for asset classes, useful lives and depreciation keys, the split proposal, the approval routing, the SAP posting, the evidence pack, the watchdog and the reporting
SAP S/4HANA asset masters, settlements, transfers and retirements through the standard interfaces where they exist and through the SAP transactions with UiPath SAP activities where they do not; the maintenance master where the asset number is wanted
How the automated process works
- PersonThe project owner raises a settlement, transfer or disposal request from the project's Teams channel: which project, the acceptance date, the protocol
- AutomationPower Automate validates it, files the protocol on SharePoint and writes the request into the settlement list
- AutomationOrchestrator picks it up and a robot pulls the WBS cost lines, goods receipts and open commitments out of SAP
- AutomationThe rules table proposes one row per asset: class, useful life, depreciation key and the capitalisation date from the protocol; lines it cannot map are marked
- PersonThe accountant and the project owner approve or correct the proposal in one Action Center task inside Microsoft Teams
- AutomationThe robot creates the asset masters and settles the assets under construction with the asset value date from the protocol, so depreciation starts in the month of acceptance
- AutomationThe evidence pack is filed against the asset number: cost lines, protocol, rules applied, both approvals
- AutomationEach month a watchdog lists every asset under construction over the threshold with its owner and age, and refreshes the Power BI page in the capital projects channel
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Collecting the cost lines, goods receipts, commitments and protocol behind one request
- Proposing the asset split, class, useful life, depreciation key and capitalisation date from the rules table
- Posting the settlement, transfer or retirement in SAP and filing the evidence against the asset number
- The monthly watchlist, the ageing of assets under construction by owner and capital spend against plan
People decide
- Whether the asset is genuinely available for use and from which date, the owner's statement and not a calculation
- The treatment of anything the rules table cannot map, and any component the accountant judges should be expensed
- Useful lives that depart from the group table, a documented finance decision
- Disposals, scrapping and transfers, which need the receiving plant as well as the accountant
Before and after
Systems and integrations
Every entry can be checked in vendor documentation. The evidence class is stated next to each one.
Inputs
- the settlement request from Microsoft Forms
- WBS cost lines and open commitments in SAP
- the goods receipts behind them
- the signed handover protocol on SharePoint
- the group rules table for asset classes and useful lives
Automation layer
- UiPath Orchestrator
- UiPath Robots
- UiPath Integration Service
- UiPath Action Center
- Power Automate
Target systems
- SAP S/4HANA asset accounting and project system
- the SharePoint evidence library
- the Power BI capital spend model
Human touchpoints: the request form in the project's Microsoft Teams channel; the Action Center approval task; the monthly watchlist in the capital projects channel
Technologies used
the settlement, transfer and disposal request, validated into the register
Aone queue item per request, the SAP work, retries, credentials and audit
Acost lines and goods receipts out, asset masters and settlements in
Athe settlement proposal approved by accountant and owner without leaving Teams
Awhere requests are raised, disposals approved and the watchlist posted
Athe protocol library and one evidence pack per asset number
Aageing of assets under construction by owner, capital spend against plan, the capitalisation lag
AIllustrative economic model
The arithmetic is open, so it can be argued with.
A settlement is priced as one case end to end, because that is how it is worked: reading the cost report, deciding which lines belong to which asset, agreeing the split and the acceptance date with the owner, then keying, posting and filing. Late depreciation is not in this table, nor is the year-end scramble on old balances. €34 an hour is a fully loaded cost for a senior asset accountant in Central Europe; nothing below was measured at a client.
Run the numbers on your data
An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.
Business benefits
- Capitalisation happens in the month the machine is accepted, so depreciation starts from the date the standard points at, not the date the paperwork arrived
- The project owner reports an event he already knows about, in three answers, instead of being chased for information he then reconstructs
- One settlement stops being half a day of reading cost reports; the accountant reviews a prepared proposal and approves or corrects it
- Assets under construction stop being a holding pen: every open line carries an age, a value and a person, transfers and disposals follow the same path, and capital spend can be read against the plan
The management view
- Capital spend becomes visible in the shape the board approved it in, project by project, not as a total that stops at the ledger, and the lag between acceptance and capitalisation becomes a monthly number with an owner
- Useful lives and asset classes come from one table across three plants, and every departure is a recorded decision
- Audit evidence exists without being assembled: protocol, cost lines, rules applied and two approvals against the asset number
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Security is designed with the process, not after it.
- The robot posts with its own SAP account, confined to asset accounting and project settlement and read-only elsewhere; its secrets are drawn at runtime from the credential store your tenant runs, Orchestrator's own or Azure Key Vault, and every posting carries its request number
- Nobody capitalises alone. A settlement posts only after the owner has confirmed the acceptance date and the accountant has confirmed the split, and both actions are recorded against the asset
- Requests, protocols, evidence packs and approvals stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant, the automation runs in the UiPath Automation Cloud EU region, and the rules table is versioned: changing an asset class, a useful life or a threshold needs the accounting policy owner
Why now
Depreciation begins when an asset is available for use, in the location and condition management intended: a fact known on the shop floor and rarely recorded there. A register that starts it when the paperwork arrives reports a date the standard does not point at, month after month
Capital plans in manufacturing are rising with automation, energy and capacity programmes, and every project adds an asset under construction to the same two-person team; the modelled €2,300 a month is the smaller half of what that costs
The pieces are ordinary and verified: SAP OData and BAPI connectors for reading and posting, SAP GUI activities where no interface exists, Action Center tasks inside Teams and a request raised in Microsoft Forms. Nothing here needs AI, because matching cost lines to asset classes is a rules problem
Relevant executive roles
The result stops depending on when a protocol reached the shared-service centre, and capital spend can be read against the plan the board approved
The machine his team accepted appears in the register, the insurance schedule and the maintenance list in the month it started producing
Two people stop rebuilding cost splits in Excel, and assets under construction stop being a year-end problem
Common questions and objections
That review shows what is open, not what has finished. Here the trigger is the person who accepted the machine, and the watchlist arrives monthly with a name and an age against each line.
Part of it is, and that part stays with finance. The table proposes what repeats: cost element to asset class, class to useful life and depreciation key, protocol date to capitalisation date. What it cannot map arrives as a named exception.
It replaces emails they already write. Three questions, in the Teams channel they use for the project anyway; the alternative is the same information extracted one message at a time over three weeks.
When this is not the right solution
- Companies with a handful of investments a year, where an accountant and a calendar reminder cost less than an automation
- Groups whose projects do not collect costs on a WBS element or internal order, because costs booked straight to the general ledger leave nothing to settle
- Plants where the acceptance date is recorded nowhere, since the automation would post a guessed date faster than a person; the handover discipline is the real project
A question for the next management meeting
Can this board name the date on which each of our three largest assets under construction became available for use, and say why depreciation had not started from it?
Implementation approach
Delivery runs in stages, so it can be stopped at any point.
We deliver
- One closed capital year taken apart: the settlements and transfers, how each was split, and where the acceptance dates actually lived
- The rules table from cost element to asset class and from class to useful life and depreciation key, written so an auditor can read it
- The request form with its validation, the settlement register, the protocol library, the cost-line reader and the split proposal
- The SAP posting with its error handling, the Action Center approval, the monthly watchlist and the Power BI page, then a pilot on one plant and a runbook
We need from you
- Two closed years of settlements with the cost reports behind them, including three cases the accountant remembers as difficult
- A process owner in asset accounting, a sponsor among the project owners and whoever owns the useful-life policy
- Your capitalisation policy, and technical accounts in SAP with display rights across the project system and asset accounting, posting rights limited to the document types the policy names
Stages
Discovery
One capital year, the real split decisions, the acceptance evidence and what SAP can be read for
Design and build
Rules table, approval routing, thresholds, security model, then the request form, cost-line reader, SAP posting and reporting
Validation
Replay of a closed year against what was posted, then rule tuning with the accountant
Go-live
One plant under supervision, then the others, disposals and transfers last
Departmental. Effort follows the variety of the split rules and the quality of the acceptance evidence, not the number of plants: one chart of depreciation and a disciplined protocol is a short project, three entities with their own capitalisation habits is not.
The line has been making product since March. In our books it is still a project.
Send us your open list of assets under construction and one closed capital year with the cost reports behind it. We return the ageing by owner and the share of settlements a rules table would have proposed.
Age one plant's assets under constructionThe neighbouring process usually has the same problem
Your entities disagree about what they owe each other, and the consolidation waits for an email.
View solution Management & planningBudget and forecast collection without version chaosStop spending a quarter of an analyst's year collecting spreadsheets from cost-centre owners.
View solution Operations & qualityPreventive maintenance that runs to planStop releasing work orders by printer and typing the completion reports back a week later.
View solutionIndustries we deliver this in most oftenManufacturing & industryTransport & logisticsServices & ITEnergy & utilities