Equipment and scheduling
Equipment records
One record per machine. What it is, what it cost, when you bought it, and what it is worth now.
Why keep that here instead of a spreadsheet? Because the machine you look at when you decide whether to replace it is the same record that produces the depreciation on your balance sheet. One number, not two that drifted apart.
Fixed assets and depreciation
Each asset carries three figures: what you paid, when you bought it, and the depreciation taken so far. From those it gives you book value — then and now.
Depreciation posts to the ledger itself. It is not a separate schedule your accountant keeps and journals in once a year. That arrangement gives you a balance sheet that is right in April and drifts all year.
Book value and market value are different questions
The software holds both, on purpose.
Book value is what the asset is worth after depreciation. That is the figure your balance sheet wants.
Market value is what the machine would actually sell for. That is the figure your banker asks about when you borrow against equipment.
The two are rarely the same. A machine can be fully depreciated and still have years of work left in it. Most operations hold one number and work the other out on the phone while the lender waits.
The equipment calendar
What is committed, where, and when.
Two enterprises can plan on the same machine in the same week. Usually that gets found at six in the morning by whoever needed it second. A calendar turns it into a decision made in the office instead.
Scheduling people as well as machines
You can schedule crews too, not just equipment. Crews can be grouped, so you assign a team instead of building one from a list of names every time.
Why this sits with the accounting
An hour of machine time is a cost. It belongs to whichever part of your business used the machine.
When the schedule and the ledger are one system, that happens on its own. The machine ran for an enterprise, so the cost lands on that enterprise.
When they are two systems, somebody copies a timesheet at month end. Either it does not get done, or it gets done from memory.
That link is also what makes machine time usable as an overhead driver — dollars per machine hour. Which only means something if somebody is recording the hours.