Hi TomW, 

A bit of a disclaimer, I am not an accountant, so my advice is only to point out how another QuickBooks user chose to record additional expenses for fixed assets.

I used to work in the support side of customer care and ran into a person who solved a similar issue. that they did was create a separate account for each fixed asset, then the expenses would be tracked individually.  A custom summary report would then be filtered to show just the accounts that you want to see for the time period.  

The Fixed Asset Manager in QuickBooks desktop is built to track depreciation expenses only, but I like the idea of the results you want. There is a good chance that another community member will respond with good advice as well. 

-John