Assets & stock guide

An asset is one physical thing the business owns and wants to keep track of. Each has a tag — AST-00042 unless your instance numbers them differently — which is what gets printed on its label and what people type or scan to find it. A tag never changes once the label is on the thing, so the series has no year in it.

Every asset has a status: in stock, checked out, leased, in repair, broken, lost, held for sale — or one of the four ways it leaves the books (disposed, sold, donated, scrapped). Assets that have left are kept as history: they drop out of the register's default view and every total, but their rows, files and audit trail stay.

The Assets menu follows an asset's life: Register (the register, what is out on loan, adding one), Upkeep (maintenance, agreements and funds), Tags & counts (scanning, labels, stock-takes) and Finance & setup (depreciation, categories and locations). You see only the links your permissions open.

Most of the register is items — anything that is not a deployable unit. An item's place is the location it is kept in; choose the store room and the site follows.

Machines and vehicles are the units the deployment board assigns operators to. They live in the same register, so a crane gains a cost, a warranty and files, but its site is the deployment board's to change: deploy someone to another site with it, or use Vessels & equipment, and the register follows. A machine can become a vehicle and back; nothing else can change kind once created.

A vessel is a work site first — it is where crew deploy to. Its register row carries what a site cannot: cost, insurance, maintenance and files. The register shows a Vessels not yet in the register strip; one click adds the row, named and tagged after the vessel. A vessel has exactly one register row, never sits in a store room, cannot be cloned, and never shows up as a second unit on the deployment screens.

• Tag — leave it blank and the next one in the series is used. A tag you type is upper-cased and may use A–Z, 0–9, ., _ and -, which every barcode format and web address can carry.
• Clone — on any asset's page, Clone starts a new one with everything twenty identical laptops share. The tag, serial number, files and history are not copied.
• Copies… — beside Clone, makes up to 100 at once. Leave prefix, start and suffix blank and each copy takes the next tag in the series, or number them yourself (LAP- + 001 gives LAP-001, LAP-002…). Each copy keeps everything but the tag, serial, photo and files, and the page offers their labels next.
• Linked to — a docking station that belongs with a laptop, a trailer with its tractor. An asset cannot be linked to itself or to anything already linked beneath it.
• Purchase details — vendor (any contractor), invoice number, date and cost in a three-letter currency. Cost is shown only to people with Assets · Finance.
• Custom fields — IMEI, licence plate, insured value: anything else your business records is set up once on the Custom fields tab of reference data, with Asset chosen, and then appears on every asset's form. (Custom fields are switched on per instance.)

Delete is for an asset entered by mistake. Once an asset has a history — it was deployed, named in a safety incident, or has others linked to it — delete is refused. Something that has really left the business is disposed of, and keeps its row.

Assets › Categories & locations has four tabs: Categories, Locations, Maintenance (how far ahead work counts as due) and Loan reminders. Saving on a tab brings you back to the same tab.

Categories group the register — IT equipment above Laptops and Phones — and carry the depreciation defaults (method, useful life, residual %) that an asset takes unless its own form says otherwise. A capitalisation threshold and a replacement charge can be set by someone with Assets · Finance.

Locations are the rooms, store rooms and shelves within a work site, and may sit inside one another — Engineering store › Aisle 1 › Bin A. The same locations are the bins the stock store counts by (see Stock in bins). A category or location that assets or stock still use is retired rather than deleted, so their history keeps its place names.

Each asset can hold photos, invoices, manuals and warranty papers. A photo is shown beside the asset in the register. Photos are turned upright and re-saved without their hidden metadata, so a picture taken on someone's desk does not carry the GPS position of their home.

Data import has three asset sheets, loaded in this order: Asset categories, Asset locations (on sites that already exist), then Assets. Download each template, fill it in, and the preview shows every row as new, changed, unchanged or refused before anything is saved.

An asset row is matched on its tag, or on its serial number when the tag is blank; a row with neither is new and is given the next tag. A blank-tag row whose serial two assets already share is refused rather than guessed — give it a tag.

Check out hands an item to an employee, a site or location, or a department, optionally with a date it is due back. Lease sends it to a customer — any contractor on file. Reserve books it for dates ahead; a booking that overlaps another is refused, and fulfilling it turns it into a check-out. Linked items go with their parent, and the form says so before you save.

Tick Send an email on a check-out, lease or booking to confirm it to the person (at the address on their employee record) or the customer (on their contractor record); returns can email a receipt the same way. Sites and departments get no email.

An employee can sign a handover receipt in person. The signed copy is filed on the asset, and the receipt carries the written permission the Employment Act needs before an unreturned item may be deducted from final pay. Without that signature, an unreturned item becomes a claim HR raises — it is never deducted on its own.

Out on loan lists everything out, the overdue items first, plus leases and bookings. Staff see what they hold under My assets in the portal (view only). A leaver's offboarding clearance stays open until everything checked out to them is back.

Tick assets on the register or the Out on loan list, or paste or scan a list of tags, and choose what to do: check out, lease, book, take back, move, record an event or schedule maintenance. A whole filter can be taken too, up to 200 assets. The next screen previews every asset with what will happen to it, or why it cannot.

Each asset goes through exactly the checks on its own card. Anything refused is left as it was and listed afterwards, and the rest go ahead. Linked items travel with what they are attached to. A batch checked out to one person ends on a single receipt for them to sign; emails, when ticked, go one to each person or customer, listing everything of theirs in the batch. Marking lost or found stays one asset at a time.

A work order is one job on one asset — a service, a repair or an inspection — with a due date, who does it (a vendor, a named technician, or both) and, for finance, what it cost. Schedule one from the asset's card, or type a tag on the Maintenance list.

A job can repeat every so many days or months. Completing it schedules the next one, counted from the date it was actually done, so a service done late does not leave the next one already overdue. Cancelling a repeating job ends the schedule.

Starting a job can mark the asset in repair while the work happens; completing or cancelling the job puts it back in stock. Disposing of an asset cancels its open jobs. The list's Due tab looks ahead by the number of days set under Categories & locations › Maintenance (a week unless you change it).

An agreement is a service contract, a software licence, an insurance policy, funding, or an extended warranty. One agreement can cover many assets. Each has a provider, a reference, the dates it runs, and (for finance) its cost and coverage. The contract or policy document goes on it as a file.

A licence can have a seat count. Once every seat is used, covering one more asset is refused rather than quietly over-deploying the licence.

A funding agreement — a grant, a capex budget — reads as a budget. Its amount is what was granted (left blank, its cost is used instead); Drawn is the purchase cost of the assets it covers, worked out fresh each time, and Available is what is left, shown in red as Overdrawn once it goes below zero. An asset with no purchase cost, or bought in another currency, is listed as not counted rather than converted. Covering one more asset says how it changes the fund, and warns when it takes the fund past its amount. These amounts are shown only to people with Assets · Finance.

Agreements follow the assets they cover. You see an agreement when it covers at least one asset you can see, and you can change or delete it only when you can see every asset it covers. Someone who looks after one resort cannot rename the group-wide fleet policy that covers their boats, but they can put more of their own assets under it. Assets at sites they do not look after are counted on the agreement, never named.

An asset is depreciated once it has a cost, the date it came into use (or was bought), and a useful life, from its own form or its category. Straight line, declining balance at 150% or 200%, and sum-of-the-years'-digits are offered. The month it comes into use is charged in full, and the month it leaves is not. A month marked held for sale is not charged, and putting the asset back in use catches those months up. The asset card shows its book value today and when it will be fully depreciated.

Changing an estimate (life, method, residual, or a category default the asset relies on) applies from the month of the change. Months already charged stand, and what is left is spread over the life that remains (IAS 8). An impairment, recorded from the card by someone with Assets · Finance, lowers the carrying amount in its month and spreads the rest over the remaining life. It cannot be dated into a month already posted to the ledger.

Assets › Depreciation is the fixed-asset register for a month: opening, charge, impairment and closing for each asset, totalled per currency, with CSV and Excel downloads. With finance export switched on, the same page posts the month as a journal to any finance target payroll uses. The journal debits depreciation expense, credits accumulated depreciation, and takes disposals off the books against cost, proceeds and gain or loss. Each target's accounts are set under Finance integrations › Mappings › Fixed-asset accounts, once for every category, with extra rows for any category that posts elsewhere.

Months are posted in order, once each per target. A correction made after a month was posted, such as a fixed cost or a back-dated disposal, is not lost. It goes into the next month's journal as an adjustment. The first month posted to a target takes everything before it as already in the ledger. Posting needs Finance · Manage and Assets · All sites, because a journal covers every asset of the company.

Print labels from the register (every asset the filter shows) or from one asset's card. Pick the label stock — Avery L7160 (21 to a sheet) or L7651 (65) on A4, Avery 5160 (30) on Letter, or a 2 × 1 inch thermal roll — choose a QR code, a barcode or both, and print the PDF at 100%. Labels fill the sheet from the top left, across and then down, one per asset; Copies of each (up to 20) prints spares, so one asset with three copies comes out as the top row of an A4 sheet of 21, and the rest of the sheet is kept for next time. Skip labels starts part-way down a sheet someone has already used. Each label carries the QR code, the tag in print, the asset's name and the company that owns it and, where the label is wide enough, a Code 128 barcode for handheld scanners; a barcode too small to read reliably is left off rather than printed. The Adding an asset video ends on a printed sheet.

The QR code holds a link to /a/ and the tag — nothing else. Opening it needs a sign-in, and anyone who may not see that asset gets the same "not found" as for a tag that does not exist. If the QR codes would carry the wrong address, the label page says so before you print: the address comes from App:BaseUrl.

Scan a label on a phone: tap Scan with camera and hold the label in the frame. The camera starts only when you tap, and stops when you leave the page. A phone that will not share its camera (an install on plain http, or a locked-down work phone) can take a photo of a label instead, and a USB or Bluetooth scanner types straight into the box.

A stock-take counts one site, or one room and everything under it. Start it under Stock-takes and scan each label on the shelves; every scan says at once whether the asset belongs here, was recorded somewhere else, or was already counted, and the camera keeps running between labels. Only things that should be on the shelf are expected — an asset with a person, out on lease or away for repair is not counted missing.

Closing writes down everything still uncounted as missing (each asset's history shows it) and can move what was found elsewhere to where it was counted. Machines and vehicles stay where the deployment board has them. A closed stock-take cannot be reopened; one with nothing counted can be deleted. The library's Missing in audits and Not audited in a year reports follow up across audits.

Consumable stock — uniforms, PPE, bedding, toner — lives under Facilities › Stock, with its ledger at Stock movements, counted by quantity rather than by tag. With this module on, the store can keep it by bin: the receive, issue and move forms offer every location as a place, named from its site down. Each line shows how many are in each bin, and Move takes some from one bin to another without changing the total.

Once a line has stock in a bin, taking it out needs the bin named; whatever was never binned can still be issued as before. A delivery can carry its purchase order or delivery note number, which Stock movements keeps.

A line can have a SKU (unique across the catalogue), a colour or style, a supplier link, a reorder level and a maximum. A delivery that takes a line past its maximum is still taken in — the goods are already on the shelf — with a warning, and the line is badged Over; the nightly check tells stock managers what is over as well as what is low.

Tick Sign for it now when issuing and the employee signs on the screen for what they took. The signed receipt is filed in their documents, the ledger links to it, and it cannot be deleted while the issue it records stands.

The nightly check sends asset managers (Assets · Manage) a reminder when a warranty or an agreement is 90, 60, 30 or 7 days from its end, and on the day it ends. This is the same ladder HR's document expiry uses, but the reminder goes only to the asset managers who look after that asset's sites, and never into HR's expiry digest. They also get one nightly count of the work orders coming due or already late. People who check items out (Assets · Issue) hear about overdue returns, and the holder gets a reminder on the day an item is due back.

Under Categories & locations › Loan reminders, set how many days ahead (up to 30) to warn that a check-out or lease is due back — 0 turns the early warning off. Issuers then see what is due soon in their nightly count and on Out on loan's Due soon tab, and staff with a portal login get a nudge. Tick Email the holder or customer too and they are also emailed, once when it is due soon and once when it is overdue.

The register's front page has a Coming up list covering the next 30 days: jobs due, warranties and agreements ending, returns due and bookings starting. It opens on its own when anything is late.

The register's filter box takes the same words as every list — category:Laptops, status:Broken,Lost, warranty:today..+90d, or just a tag, serial or name. The column picker adds brand, model, serial, department and (for finance) cost; CSV and Excel exports carry what you filtered.

The report library has an Assets set. It covers the register by tag, category, site, department, status, linked assets, recent purchases and warranties ending; the lost and disposed lists; past-due check-outs, leases, bookings and transactions; maintenance due, past due, cost and history; and contracts, licences, insurance and funding. The Assets dashboard under Analytics shows the register by category, site and status, alongside maintenance done and late and agreements ending. The home page can carry an Asset register panel.

The register is scoped by reporting group, like the deployment tracker. An asset belongs to its own reporting group if it has one, otherwise to its site's. Someone without Assets · All sites sees only assets in the groups assigned to their user — and an account with no groups sees none, so a new storekeeper is never handed the whole company's property by accident.

The things that count the whole register — the report library, the Analytics dashboard and the global search box — need Assets · All sites, because they have no way to narrow to a person's groups. A storekeeper finds their own assets with the register's filter box.

• Assets · View opens the register (within scope).
• Assets · Issue checks out, returns, leases, books and moves assets.
• Assets · Manage adds, edits, clones and deletes assets and their files, and runs maintenance, agreements, labels and stock-takes.
• Assets · Dispose records an asset as disposed of, sold, donated or scrapped.
• Assets · Setup manages categories and locations.
• Assets · Finance shows cost, residual value, repair costs, agreement cost and coverage, and the finance settings.
• Assets · All sites lifts the reporting-group scope.

The module is switched on per instance. Turning it on does not grant anyone these permissions except Admin — tick them for the right roles under Admin › Roles.