[Breaking Change Notice] Changes to capital assets and associated bank transaction explanations, bill items and expenses

Announcements
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Hi everyone :wave:

This is an important message that all API users should read.

As per our previous update, we are now in a position to release expanded support for depreciation. These changes will affect bill items, expenses, and bank transaction explanations as previously outlined. Please see our updated API docs on Depreciation Profiles for more details on how to deal with capital assets from on, and the additional depreciation options that will be available to you.

Deprecated Fields

The depreciation_schedule field for expenses and bill items along with the asset_life_years field for bank account entries is now deprecated. From now on, you should instead include a capital_asset object which specifies a depreciation_profile. See the Depreciation Profile API docs for details.

You will still be able to use the deprecated fields and they will still be present in requests for a period of time. Assets created using depreciation schedule will be able to be updated to use a depreciation profile if desired, but note that the opposite will not be possible. If an asset was created with a depreciation profile, you will not be able to update it with the depreciation schedule field.

Where an asset was created using a depreciation method for which depreciation schedule is not relevant (reducing balance and no depreciation) the field will be present but set to 0.

Differences From Announced Changes

As work has progressed there have been a few minor changes to some of the specific details we announced.

  • In our previous post we stated that one of the options for depreciation frequency would be annual. It will now instead be annually to match the other option of monthly.

  • We are not exposing details of whether an asset is using a legacy or non-legacy straight line depreciation implementation as this shouldn’t be necessary.

Please check the change log and see the API docs section on depreciation profiles for more details.

We recommend that you switch over to using the new fields as soon as possible after the release. Even though the deprecated fields will still exist for a short time after the release, we will remove them entirely later in 2024.

If you have any questions about these changes or notice any issues after this has been implemented, please post on the forum where a member of the community or a FreeAgent staff member may be able to help you.

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