Back to school – Is your asset register ready for another term?

The most important register taken at schools and other educational establishments is, of course, the one that ensures that pupils are not missing from classes. There is, however, another crucial list that needs to be checked at the start and end of each term (at least!) – The Asset Register!

Keeping an accurate and up-to-date register of all of equipment, assets and mobile inventory is crucial for a number of reasons. Primarily, it enables organisations to establish exactly what it owns and reduces the risk of unexpected losses or theft. With thousands of people traversing the premises on a daily basis, it is naturally difficult to keep track of all items.

We’ve decided to write up a few of our top tips for ensuring that your Asset Register meets expectations!

Don’t procrastinate – be proactive with asset tracking exercises!

In the same way that teachers tell students not to delay tasks, asset tracking should be at the forefront of the responsible employee’s to-do list! This can involve scanning asset barcodes when they are issued or returned from/to their storage locations. If an asset is checked each time it is moved, that will make locating it in future a far easier and quicker task.

Some systems, like ours ;-), also feature signature authorisation, which ensures that users will be able to easily find assets by checking who signed them out most recently. This sort of functionality would be most beneficial for Universities, with students borrowing expensive equipment regularly.

A specialist system (I wonder where you could find one of those…) will reduce the amount of time it takes to compile reports!

We can’t speak for other systems, but MRI’s asset management solution features an in-depth reporting suite that covers all bases. The reports provide all relevant data pertaining to financial details, important dates, locations, serial numbers, ownership and condition.

Cloud-hosting can minimise the amount of administrative resources required!

You’re not going to believe this, but MRI’s asset tracking solution can be installed either on-premise or in the Cloud. Whilst there are benefits to both approaches, we appreciate that many educational establishments find it difficult to dedicate resources to managing an asset database and the server it is restored on. If the system is deployed in the Cloud, MRI’s team completely manages all back-end aspects and ensure that all security policies are adhered to.

For educational establishments that report on depreciation, automated calculating functionality speeds up processes!

Having depreciation calculated by a specialist system will provide users with an accurate reflection of how much an item is worth and the impact that depreciation has had.

We don’t like to brag, but our depreciation functionality is fast, easy-to-use and most importantly – it calculates figures correctly based on the depreciation method specified.