When the New Depreciation Engine was released back in 2006, SAP made a significant shift in how depreciation would be calculated going forward. There was an extremely significant change in how the underlying parameters were used to calculate asset depreciation as well as a series of small feature improvements for some statutory depreciation requirements that the old calculation could not handle. Within our fixed asset community this was a big deal. Very big. There were certain requirements, particularly country requirements, that we had dealt with for years using some work-arounds because standard SAP couldn’t fulfill them. In most cases the standard calculation came close but wasn’t exact in certain situations.
In the 4th blog (links below) I talked about the usefulness of a new tcode [AW01_AFAR]. Since EA-FIN is now a prerequisite for S/4HANA and the New Asset Accounting solution, AW01_AFAR is no longer delivered. SAP did away with it because the old depreciation engine is no longer available to be used. Granted, the transaction code was mostly useful during the migration process and for a period after the new calculation was live. We would field calls from customers about a variety of depreciation issues and this tcode was instrumental in figuring out what the issue was or convincing them that there wasn’t anything wrong with the NewDCP for that situation.
Time flies. It’s 2018 and the NewDCP isn’t so new anymore. R.I.P. AW01_AFAR.
If you want to read more about the NewDCP, I published a 4 part blog series on it back in 2007 here on our site:
Details on SAP’s New Depreciation Engine (Part 1): Introduction
Details on SAP’s New Depreciation Engine (Part 2): Explanation of Time Intervals
Details on SAP’s New Depreciation Engine (Part 3): Time-Dependent Depreciation Parameters
Details on SAP’s New Depreciation Engine (Part 4): Changes to the Asset Explorer
