What Is An Asset Register And Why Is One Essential For Your Business?

Published on June 14, 2021 • 3 min read

An asset register is a way for your business to monitor what you own, how assets are behaving, and any asset-related costs. Overall, an asset register gives you:

• More visibility over your assets
• More visibility over asset finances
• More control over your assets
• Fewer lost assets
• Fewer duplicate purchases
• A clear view over how your assets behave

Most businesses are opting for a pen and paper method and logging changes in a spreadsheet. This spreadsheet will act as an asset register but has too many gaps and inefficiencies to remain viable.

Spreadsheets have your assets in one column, their identifiable information in the next, then all other columns are specific fields relevant to your assets. If you think about these fields and how some are relevant to some assets and not to others, this can quickly become a lengthy, unwieldy, and impossible to manage spreadsheet, especially as the data you'll likely need to find and change will live in a single cell.

This is where asset management software systems come into play. These automatically create an asset register, ready for you to view, manage, and export.

What Is An Asset Register?

An asset register is a list of your assets with data assigned to them. The assets themselves will depend on which industry your in and the data will depend on what you're using your asset register for.

Every business should have a fixed asset register and an IT asset register. Fixed assets are permanent business fixtures that aren't sold and are instead used by your business. IT assets are your laptops, phones, and any other assets with IT capabilities, such as USB sticks.

The data itself can be pricing information, maintenance data, equipment booking information, and more. However, a fixed asset register should track asset values.

Your asset register will either be a spreadsheet or a pdf and you can use it for:

• Tax and insurance purposes
• Mitigating ghost and zombie assets
• Seeing what you own quickly
• Tracking asset movements
• Tracking depreciation

What Should You Add To Your Register?

Your asset register should contain relevant assets that you need to track. Thankfully, with asset management software you can add all of your assets and segment them into different, filtered reports.

In other words, you can add all of your assets, such as fixed assets, vehicles, and IT assets, then create an asset register specific to only your IT assets for separate reporting purposes.

Your asset register, therefore, should contain assets relevant to auditing operations. Any assets that you need to track and maintain accountability over should be on your asset register. 

In terms of fixed asset management, you will be able to add all of your fixed assets to your system, but on an asset register filter out any assets with a value of under £200, say, if you don't need these to be tracked.

Creating A Fixed Asset Register

When creating a fixed asset register, the simplest way to do this is by using asset management software. Asset management software allows you to log your assets as unique profiles on an online system and track them this way.

Instead of using a spreadsheet, therefore, if you want to see the relevant information against a specific asset, you don't need to find that asset on your spreadsheet, you can enter its unique profile instead.

Issues management and data entry, for example, are much simpler this way, as you're logging information against a specific asset in a streamlined and transparent view. 

You can speed this along further by using asset tags. Every time you scan an asset's tag, the last seen location will update, the asset's profile will open, and the time of scan and user who scanned the tag will get logged, creating a streamlined and neat audit trail.

All of this data is pulled into your fixed asset register automatically, ready to be managed, filtered and exported. As you can filter these reports, therefore, you can pick and choose which data gets exported. This way, you can export a report on your IT assets separately to your fixed asset register with ease, keeping a clear log of everything you need to know.

Depreciating Your Assets

Your reports will also include a section to monitor your assets' values. These values will depreciate, showing you how much depreciation has occurred against a group of assets, or against all of your assets, each month.

These reports are filterable, so if you only need to export and view data of assets above a certain value, this is entirely possible. 

As you'll have all of your issues data, as well as day to day tracking data, too, you get the best of both worlds. For example, if an asset has fully depreciated, you will be able to look into that asset and view its history to get more context about this asset.

Using these features in tandem within a single asset management software gives you much more clarity and control over what your assets are doing.

Using Asset Management Software

When you use asset management software, you get the benefit of an automated asset register.

An asset register:

• Prevents fines for unaccounted for assets
• Shows you what you own
• Prevents duplicate purchases
• Prevents asset loss
• Gives you a clear view of your finances
• Helps speed up asset-level operations
• Helps speed up tax and insurance audits

When you use asset management software, you get all of these benefits and more. An asset management software provides you with asset-level functionality, too, such as the ability to book and check assets in and out, the ability to report issues, and the ability to track asset locations via tagging and tracking capabilities.

To find out more about how asset management software will help your business, you'll be able to contact the itemit team at team@itemit.com. You can also fill in the form below to start your very own 14-day free trial.