@Hamiltonsmith, starting balances are used only when migrating to Manager from a prior accounting system. As a result, the acquisition date, whenever it was, fell outside the coverage period of the Manager database. Start dates were eliminated from Manager years ago. So the program has no use for such information.
Personally, I do not recall acquisition date ever being a field on the fixed asset entry form. As far as I know, if a user had a desire to record that for some purpose, the way to do so was to use a custom field. I have always done that in my businesses, because it is relevant for local tax purposes, even though the program has no use for the information.
I bypassed updating to v23.10.1.1016. So I cannot say with certainty whether an acquisition date field was included in that version. But, if it was, I believe that was a bug.