Betterments
Record capital work that extended an asset's life - an overhaul, a modernization, a major component replacement - without falsifying its in-service date.
You overhaul a 1964 elevator. New controller, new drive, new door operator, new fixtures; the hoistway, rails and car sling stay. What is the asset now?
Not new - most of it is sixty years old. Not sixty-two years old either - you just spent real money and bought real years. A betterment is how you record the difference: a dated entry saying what the work cost and how much service life it bought, attached to the asset, leaving its original in-service date exactly where it was.
Why not just change the in-service date
It is the obvious workaround and it is worth knowing why it is wrong.
That one date drives six things: depreciation, the asset's age, its remaining life, how its replacement value is escalated for inflation, whether it counts toward your deferred-maintenance backlog, and the year the renewal forecast expects to replace it. Moving it to today tells all six the asset is brand new - including the parts you did not touch. You also lose the real installation year, which is usually the one piece of history nobody can reconstruct.
A betterment moves the numbers that should move and leaves the rest alone.
Recording one
Two ways in.
By hand. On an asset's Betterments tab, choose Record betterment. Open to Managers and Administrators, like the rest of that tab.
From the work that did it. When you complete a work order or a project that executed a rehabilitation lifecycle strategy event, the completion prompt offers the betterment alongside the condition - the cost pre-filled from what the work actually cost, split across the assets it covered, and the added years pre-filled from what the strategy models. Both are editable, the whole thing is optional, and nothing is written until you confirm.
From project closeout. A project that executed no strategy event still offers it: when the project moves into a completing phase, choose Record capital work. The cost is pre-filled from the project's actual cost, split across the assets named on the project, and the added life is left for you to enter. See what closeout does.
| Field | What it means |
|---|---|
| In-service date | When the work went into service - not the invoice date. This is the date its value starts depreciating from |
| Capitalized amount | What the work added to the asset's value |
| Added life (years) | How much extra service life the work bought |
| Description | What was actually done - "controller, drive and fixtures replaced" |
| Condition after the work | Optional. Sets the asset's condition score from this date |
If you are also posting the spend as a cost on the asset, use the Betterment cost category rather than Repair. Repair and PM costs feed the Replacement Planner's repair-history score, so filing a modernization as a repair would push the freshly overhauled asset up the replacement ranking.
You need at least one of capitalized amount or added life. An entry that adds neither changes nothing, so record that as an asset comment instead.
The condition field is there because the two almost always happen together. It lives on the betterment: fill it in and the asset's condition score becomes that number, editable on the betterment afterwards. Leave it blank and the asset keeps whatever score it has - a betterment with no condition on it never touches the score.
Two things can now set an asset's score, so the rule for which wins is simple and worth knowing: the most recently dated record wins, whether that is a betterment or a condition assessment. Assess the asset next month and that reading takes over; record a betterment dated after your last assessment and the betterment takes over. The assessment form still asks about the money next time a score jumps, so the pairing works from either direction.
How the value works
The original asset keeps depreciating on its original schedule. A fully written-down 1964 elevator stays fully written down - you do not write assets back up. The betterment becomes its own layer, depreciating from its own in-service date over the life it bought.
So a $180,000 modernization buying 20 years reads as $180,000 of value in the year you do it, declining to zero twenty years later. Not the elevator's replacement cost, and not zero. The asset's remaining life becomes what the work bought, its net book value on the asset's Financial card reflects the new layer, and it leaves the deferred-maintenance backlog.
Its recorded in-service date does not move. The asset is still from 1964 and still says so.
Everything that prices the asset follows: its own page, the dashboard's depreciation gauges and forecasts, the FCI backlog, the Capital Brief, and custom reports. One asset, one set of numbers.
The lifecycle projection on the asset's Overview counts it too. The curve is projected against the service life the asset actually has - original plus the years its betterments bought - so the renewal year there agrees with the remaining life shown elsewhere. Each betterment is marked on the chart at its own date - hover it for the cost and the life it bought - and listed under the chart, with a badge naming how many the asset carries and what they cost in total.
A betterment that carries a condition moves the asset's score, so it shows on the chart the way any other reading does: as a point on the recorded-condition line to the left of today, and in the anchor the forecast starts from. What it does not do on its own is bend the forecast - the life it buys makes the curve flatter and the renewal later, which against nothing to compare with is invisible. So the chart draws a dashed line for the asset with none of this recorded against it - no lifecycle strategy events, no capital work. Two lines, one question: what all of it bought. That comparison drops both halves of what the work bought - the added years, and the condition, which would otherwise be credited to an asset that never had the work done. It anchors instead at the newest reading taken before the work, or at the asset's age if it was never scored before then. The badge states the capital's own share of the gap as +N yrs. Recording a betterment is also enough to draw the card at all: an asset with capital work and no lifecycle strategy charts its unassisted decline with the work on it, rather than waiting for a strategy to exist.
What is not a betterment
- Routine maintenance and repairs. These are costs, not capital. They belong on the TCO tab as ordinary entries and feed repair-cost history.
- A full replacement. If the asset was replaced outright rather than renewed, it is a new asset.
- A planned future intervention. That is a lifecycle strategy event, which models work you expect to do. A betterment records work you have already done.
API access
Betterments are a full API and MCP resource (scope family asset_betterments): integrators and AI assistants can read and record them through the same scoped, tenant-bound access as every other resource.