"Manually" Calculate Residual Value

[Fitz4]

The requirement from the business is to populate the residual value field of a hardware asset from a 3rd party system.  Lots of good posts out there about how residual value is a read only field since it is calculated by the "Calculating Depreciation" scheduled job.  Since this all is really handled by the 3rd party system based on business unit, country, asset type, etc, how can we use existing fields like cost, depreciation, depreciation effective date, etc to calculate this single value?  I've tried various combinations, including blank depreciation, future date for depreciation effective data (setting the cost alone to depreciated value coming from that 3rd party system).  Nothing seems to work.  Has anyone attempted to do this before?  I would have to think a lot of folks are getting this data from a 3rd party financial system:  How have you approached it? 

[Matthew_13]

This comes up a lot my friend, The short answer is that ServiceNow’s residual value field isn’t meant to be driven externally. It’s a calculated field that’s owned by the depreciation engine, and the Calculating Depreciation scheduled job will always recalculate it based on the depreciation model. That’s why all the combinations you tried (future effective date, blank depreciation, tweaking cost, etc.) don’t stick — the job eventually overwrites them.

Because your source of truth is a 3rd-party financial system, the most common and safest approach is not to fight the OOTB residual value field at all.

What most customers do instead:

• Create a custom field like “Residual Value (Finance)”

• Populate that field from the 3rd-party system via integration

• Use that field for reporting, views, and any downstream logic that needs the finance value

If you absolutely must use the OOTB residual value field, the only real options are:

• Exclude those assets from ServiceNow depreciation (no depreciation model / exclude from the job), or

• Customize the depreciation logic so it uses the external value — which is usually avoided because it’s upgrade-sensitive

That’s why you don’t see a clean “recipe” using cost, depreciation amount, or effective date alone — the depreciation engine expects the full model to line up.

I normally see the separate finance controlled field approach is what most organizations use, especially when depreciation and residuals are owned outside ServiceNow.

@Fitz4 - Please mark as Solution Accepted and Thumbs Up if you find Helpful 🙂