Fixed Asset Health Assessment

Diagnose before you treat. The Fixed Asset Health Assessment examines the lifecycle and the operating environment around it, finds root causes instead of symptoms, and hands you a prioritized roadmap you can actually fund and sequence.

I built it because I kept watching organizations make six- and seven-figure fixed asset decisions with no current picture of how their own environment works. A balanced register is not a healthy one. A clean audit is not a controlled process. And a shiny new system is not a strategy — it is a very fast way to keep doing whatever you were already doing.

A balanced register is not a healthy environment

Most organizations find out their fixed asset environment is fragile at the least convenient moment available: mid-implementation, mid-audit, mid-acquisition, or the week after the one person who truly understood the process handed in their notice. I have been called in on every one of those weeks.

The assessment exists to surface that fragility while you still have room to move — with evidence attached, so the findings become something leadership can fund and sequence instead of something three departments argue about politely for a year.

What we examine

Fourteen dimensions of the fixed asset operating environment, scoped to what applies to your organization.

Governance & ownership

Who is accountable for each stage of the lifecycle, and whether that accountability is documented or assumed.
Policy

Capitalization thresholds, useful lives, componentization, placed-in-service rules — and whether they are written, current and applied.
Process & handoffs

How work actually moves between projects, procurement, accounting, tax and operations, including the handoffs nobody owns.
People & capability

Depth of skill, role coverage, single points of failure, and the gap between the process on paper and the process in practice.
Data & lineage

Completeness, accuracy, consistency and traceability of asset data, and where each field originates.
Systems

Configuration and fit, and whether the platform is set up to prevent a problem or only to record it after the fact.
Integration

Interfaces, manual bridges and reconciliation points — what happens when two systems have to agree with each other and do not.
Controls

Preventive and detective controls, reconciliation discipline, approval paths and segregation of duties.
Security & access

Who can change what, whether that matches their role, and whether changes are traceable after the fact.
Reporting & information delivery

Whether the numbers leadership receives are consistent, defined, reconcilable and actually used.
Documentation

Existence, currency and usability of procedures, work instructions and system documentation.
Knowledge dependency

How much of the process exists only in someone's head, and what happens to the organization if that person leaves.
Risk

Where the environment creates financial, compliance, audit and operational exposure, and what that exposure is worth if it goes unaddressed another year.
Performance

Cycle time, effort and rework — where the process is taking longer, costing more or being redone more often than it should.

What leadership receives

Findings written to be acted on, not filed.

Current-state health & maturity view

Where the environment stands across the dimensions that apply to you, in language finance and operations leadership can both use.

Material findings & supporting evidence

What we found, where we found it, and why it matters — with the evidence attached so the finding stands on its own.

Root-cause themes

The small number of underlying causes that explain the long list of symptoms.

Risk & consequence prioritization

What to address first, based on exposure and consequence rather than on what is easiest to fix.

Cross-functional dependencies

The upstream and downstream relationships that determine whether a fix will hold.

Quick wins

The changes that are worth making immediately, independent of any larger program.

Future-state recommendations

A defensible target operating environment for people, process, data, systems and controls.

Sequenced transformation roadmap

The order of operations: what has to be true before the next thing can succeed.

How the assessment runs

Structured, evidence-based, and built to avoid disrupting the close.

01

Scoping

Define which entities, systems, asset classes and lifecycle stages are in scope, and who needs to be part of the conversation.
02

Evidence gathering

Working sessions with the people who do the work, plus review of policy, documentation, system configuration, data extracts and reporting.
03

Analysis

Findings tested against the register, the general ledger and the process as it actually runs — not as it is described.
04

Root-cause synthesis

Symptoms grouped into causes, and causes traced to the part of the environment that produces them.
05

Prioritization & roadmap

Findings sequenced by risk, dependency and effort into a roadmap leadership can fund.
06

Readout & handoff

A leadership readout, the supporting detail, and a clear recommendation on what should happen next.

When an assessment is the right next step

A software implementation, migration or upgrade is being considered, planned or recovered.
CIP is aging, project closeout is slow, or capitalization timing is inconsistent.
The register no longer reliably reconciles, or reconciliation has become a manual event.
An audit, acquisition, divestiture or restructuring is putting weight on fixed asset data.
A key person has left, is leaving, or is the only one who knows how something works.
Leadership does not trust the fixed asset numbers it is being given, and cannot say why.

Start with what it is worth

The most common objection to an assessment is that it produces findings rather than savings. So start with the part that is pure arithmetic — the tax an organization pays every year on assets it no longer owns, using published industry ranges and your own register size.

YOUR NUMBERS

Gross fixed assets on your books

Original cost of everything currently sitting on the register, across every entity in scope.

Estimated ghost asset rate

Published industry ranges put ghost assets at 15–30% of a typical register. Starting at the bottom of that range is the conservative move.

Assessed value as a share of original cost

Personal property is assessed on a depreciated or index-adjusted value rather than original cost. If you file returns, use the ratio your own returns actually produce.

Effective property tax rate

The combined rate applied to assessed value. This varies enormously by jurisdiction, so your own rate beats any default here.

Assessment investment

Assessments average around $25,000. Tightly scoped ones come in below that; multi-entity, multi-system environments are scoped after a conversation.

ANNUAL LEAK

$46,875

Property tax declared and paid every year on assets you no longer own.

Ghost asset value on the register: $7,500,000
Taxable share of that value: $1,875,000
Over three years: $140,625
At the published range15–30% ghost assets: $46,875 – $93,750

That is 1.9× the assessment investment every year, and 5.6× over three — on this one exposure, before anything else on this page is counted.

Pressure-test this number with me

What this is and is not. The percentages are published third-party ranges, not our data and not a promise — ghost asset rates from CPCON Group and widely attributed to Gartner, every one of them from a source that sells asset verification. The model taxes assessed value rather than original cost, because that is how personal property is actually assessed. Nothing you type is sent anywhere or stored. The number this produces is an exposure worth testing, and testing it is what an assessment does.

See the full business case — four costs and the sources behind them

Common questions

How is a Fixed Asset Health Assessment different from an audit?

An audit tests whether the reported numbers are materially correct. The assessment examines whether the environment producing those numbers is sound — governance, policy, process, people, data, systems, integration, controls, security, reporting, documentation, knowledge dependency, risk and performance — and what it will cost you if it isn't.

How long does an assessment take?

Timeline depends on scope: how many entities, systems and asset classes are in play, and how available the people who do the work are. Focused assessments run in weeks; enterprise assessments across multiple systems and entities run longer. Duration is agreed during scoping, before the engagement begins.

Why does an assessment cost what it does when nothing is being fixed yet?

Because the expensive part of a fixed asset problem is usually the wrong remedy, not the diagnosis. Most of what an assessment costs is recovered by not funding an implementation that would have automated the wrong process, not re-cleaning data that was cleaned against the wrong target, and not repeating a closeout exercise every quarter. The assessment also does not stop at findings: it ends with quick wins your team can act on straight away and a sequenced roadmap, so the work that follows is scoped and ordered rather than guessed at.

How do I build a business case for this internally?

Start with the arithmetic you can do without me. Published industry ranges put ghost assets at 15–30% of a typical register, and because most personal property returns are prepared straight from the books, those assets are declared and taxed every year. Run your own register size through the calculator on this page, then set that recurring number beside a one-time fee. The three larger costs — a control finding, an implementation landing on an undiagnosed process, and the process that exists only in one person's head — are on the full business case page, with the sources attached.

Do we need to fix everything the assessment finds?

No. The output is prioritized on purpose. Findings are sequenced by risk, consequence and dependency, with quick wins separated from work that belongs in a funded program, so leadership can decide what to act on and in what order.

Can the assessment be limited to one system or one area?

Yes. Scope can be narrowed to a single system, entity, asset class or lifecycle stage — a Sage Fixed Assets environment, for example, or CIP and project closeout only. Narrower scope still follows the same method.

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