Business Incorporation

If you are a company with connections to the US, you might be required to know about the Sarbanes Oxley act. If you are an American company and haven’t heard of it before, then you have already learnt something about it. It’s a United States act.

The Sarbanes Oxley act is an act that was signed into US law in 2002. It was designed to put a stop to the things that went on it Enron and Worldcom. Both of these companies announced that they had been running on fraudulent deals for several years. In that year, it wasn’t required for any companies to present their finance records.

What it does is it makes sure that the companies are run safely and lawfully, if it’s found that they are not, the owners are help resonsible for any wrong doing.

The act means that CEO’s and CFO’s are required to sign the books for the company. They must sign the books before handing them over to ensure that the information is true and it represents the earnings of the company.

If it turns out the records are incorrect, there are a number of punishments available for the Chief Officers that signed the records.

Like I said at the top, you might not be required to follow the act. Only companyies within the US, UK or Europe and have listings in the US stock exchange are required to follow the act. You should also be required to follow the act if your company is based in Europe and it;s a subsidiary of a US company.

Some companies find the Sarbanes Oxley act to be a real pain. Because the company is required to report every single business transaction, even the sale and purchase of company assets. This is where people have the problem because all the company’s fixed assets must before recorded.

The process of fixed asset accounting can be expensive and take time. If you do it yourself within the company it can take several months and can often result in errors. The most efficient way to get a complete audit of your assets is by hiring an external asset management company to do the job.

Unfortunately, it’s still not a cheap process to do. However, the majority of asset management companies will offer you different features to make asset auditing simpler in the future. Many of the companies also offer Sarbanes Oxley compliance software which will make the job even easier for you.

Hopefully you will now know what the Sarbanes Oxley act is and how you have to abide by it. No doubt you won’t like the sound of the act, but you can blame Enron.

Small Business Advice asset managemet, asset tracking, assets, business, sarbanes oxley

As corporate purse strings get increasingly tightened in this period of downturn, the need for organisations to perform IT asset management is becoming more of a priority.It is the IT manager whose role is to manage this process of auditing and tracking IT assets.I have dealt with many IT managers in the past, from a wide range of different organizations, and below is a brief summary of the methods they used to track IT assets.

Spreadsheets
fixed asset register] information in a giant spreadsheet.  The procedure goes along the following lines. At first the spreadsheet is created from an initial asset audit, recording all the hardware and software being used.The most commonly recorded information includes location, name of staff member using the item, purchase date, model and serial numbers and warranty details.The spreadsheet then needs to be manually updated whenever new purchases of hardware or software are made. As with many manual business functions, the spreadsheet’s downfall is that it doesn’t scale well at all.You can imagine how such a spreadsheet would grow to unmanageable proportions as an organization gets bigger.Organizations using the spreadsheet technique also tend not to be able to react effectively to changes in the state of IT assets, such as repairs, depreciation, licenses and getting rid of equipment.  It all depends on an extremely organised person making sure it is meticulously up to date.

RFID and Asset Barcoding
The tagging of assets with barcodes has become the norm in many organizations I have dealt with, wherein each piece of hardware is tagged with a scannable barcode which refers to an exact record in the asset register.  These barcodes can be scanned using barcode scanners during regular asset audits and for helpdesk support purposes. RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, goes one step beyond traditional barcoding because they allow you to perform a hardware audit without physically scanning each asset. More importantly, RFID asset tracking allows greater flexibility for increasingly mobile equipment such as laptops and PDAs.

Fixed Asset Management Software
There are a good choice of semi-automated and customized asset management software solutions which take a lot of the pain out of the process. I have come across some companies who have created their own custom asset database using SQL and linking this to the intranet to allow multi-user administration. At the most sophisticated end of the scale is specialised “asset management software” (Google it and you’ll see the wide range of options!) covering the tracking, accounting and reporting of ALL fixed assets, not just IT assets, including property, machinery and vehicles.  There are also specially designed solutions to meet the growing plethora of asset accounting and tax regulations that companies need to meet - such as compliance with Sarbanes Oxley. The best thing about this kind of solution is that by combining the needs of IT, accounting, helpdesk support, and operations departments you also have a combined budget with which to procure a far more powerful asset management system.

If you have any other solutions your company uses for asset tracking, I’d be interested to read your comments.

Small Business Advice accounting, asset management, asset register, asset tracking, barcode tracking, fixed assets, it assets, RFID, sarbanes oxley, sox