General Tab (Depreciation)
In this tab you can edit the general settings that will apply to all depreciation calculations in the project.
- Use Depreciation: Activate/deactivate the use of depreciation in a project as a whole. Projects where the focus is on production analysis or task schedule should probably work with depreciation deactivated in order to avoid irrelevant validation warnings or extra calculation time.
- Always depreciate remainder: Use this option to let all depreciable assets complete their depreciation on the last simulation period.
- Depreciate remainder on project abandonment: Use this option to apply the remaining depreciation when an Abandonment job abandons the whole project.
- CapEx Escalation: Enter the escalation factor to be used for all depreciation calculations, either as a single factor to be used on all periods or as an array with different factors for each period. A common practice is to enter escalation as a single value which in turn uses the auxiliary function escalate(start, rate) - see Array Functions.
- Add New Depreciation Pool.
Depreciation and Project Termination
All calculations explained above assume that depreciation is calculated over the full life of an asset. So, all expense is allocated to the periods affected by depreciation and the overall sum of depreciation equates the capital expenditure.
But projects in PetroVR have limited duration and defined termination. What happens if project ends before depreciation is completed?
The answer may depend on whether the project is to be considered as "ongoing" after the end of their project model. This would be needed for example in order to model fiscal regimes where the depreciation deduction ends when the project ends and no credit for the remaining depreciation can be taken afterwards. This has an immediate consequence which breaks a previously declared invariant: the total depreciation and total CapEx will not match. For such cases, the Always depreciate remainder option can be deactivated to avoid forcing complete depreciation.
If left checked in order to obtain full depreciation, there are two different cases: normal termination of the project at the end of the forecast periods set by the user in the General Tab, and termination of the project because of a specific Abandonment job.
Normal Termination
When the simulation ends because the simulation span reaches its last day, all depreciable assets complete their depreciation in the last period. This means that the depreciation for the last period is the depreciation strictly corresponding to it, plus all pending depreciation until the end of the expected asset life.
Project Abandonment
Project abandonment jobs usually model abnormal and premature termination of the project because of external causes.
When the Depreciate remainder on project abandonment option is checked (as it is by default), depreciation works as described above (Normal termination), the abandon period becoming the last project period. In this case, all the remaining depreciation is done at the project abandonment period.
When the switch is unchecked, the remaining depreciation occurs at the last period of the simulation span as first defined. So depreciation between the abandonment period and the last period will be nil, and the last period will show all the depreciation which was not allocated during the project life.
Monte Carlo analysis is not currently applicable to Depreciation variables.