Your first equipment management rules can fit on a single page of bullet points. Decide first who is responsible and who rules on exceptions. This article then goes through lending and returns, personal items, loss and damage, disposal, sale and transfer, returns when people leave or change roles, and how often to run stocktakes, with what to decide and sample wording for each.
While clearing out the desk of someone who is leaving, you find a mobile router that was written off as lost last year. Who borrowed it, and why it never came back, nobody can say, because there is no record. In organizations that have never put their equipment rules in writing, finds like this happen again and again.
Your first equipment management rules can fit on one A4 page of bullet points. They don’t need to be written as formal numbered clauses. What you should write down first isn’t the fine detail of how to check things out. It’s who is responsible for managing equipment, and who makes the call when a situation doesn’t fit the procedure. Rules that only spell out procedures grind to a halt in the exceptions, like an urgent loan or someone leaving, because nobody is there to decide.
The rules deal with the moments when equipment changes hands and when it leaves the organization: lending it out, getting it back, losing or breaking it, and letting it go. Each of these changes what the register should say. If the facts change and nobody writes it down, the register and the equipment on the shelf start to drift apart.
On top of these four, add how personal items are handled and how returns work when people leave or change roles. Personal items are about telling whose things are whose. Leaving or changing roles is a special case of lending and returning. Neither causes trouble day to day, so both tend to get put off, and when they do cause trouble, it all comes at once.
The first line of your rules is the name of the person responsible for equipment. Write a job title or a person’s name, not a department. If all it says is “The admin team manages equipment,” nobody knows who on the admin team to ask. Everyone ends up a little involved, and no one is actually responsible.
In a small organization, one person can do this alongside their main job. But always name a deputy for when they’re away. Splitting responsibility by category, such as the video team lead for camera gear and IT for PCs, can wait until you have more than about 100 items.
Write down what the person responsible actually does, too. If you settle on a name but not the duties, the role becomes someone who only gets called when something goes wrong.
The person responsible for equipment is the admin officer (name). In their absence, (name) acts in their place. For camera and video gear, the video team lead is the designated contact and decides whether a loan can go ahead.
Situations the rules don’t cover will always come up. Someone wants to keep an item past the maximum loan period. Someone wants to lend gear to a client for a month. Someone wants to keep broken equipment for spare parts instead of throwing it out. Write one line saying who takes these requests and who decides. In most cases, the person responsible does both.
Record each decision in the loan record or in the notes column of the register. If the same request comes up three times, it’s no longer an exception, so rewrite the rules themselves.
Match the fields in your register to what the rules say. If the rules say taking items off-site needs approval, the register needs a field showing whether each item may leave the premises. If you keep personal items separate, you need an owner field. If you reconcile against accounting’s fixed asset register, you need an asset number field. Fields that no rule refers to never get filled in, and the blanks keep piling up.
The basic fields to keep in a register (asset ID, storage location, condition and so on), with filled-in examples, are covered here.Read the basics of equipment management and register fieldsLending rules are easier to write if you go topic by topic, listing what to decide and some sample wording. You don’t need all of it from day one. The top three rows of the table (scope, where to record, loan period) are enough to get started.
| Topic | What to decide | Sample wording |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Which equipment must be recorded when it’s lent | Any item with an asset ID label must be recorded whenever it is taken out. Consumables such as stationery are not covered. |
| Where to record | Where loans are recorded, and what to write | Record each loan in the check-out log with the borrower, the asset ID and the expected return date. The expected return date must never be left blank. |
| Loan period | The maximum per loan, and how to extend it | Loans are limited to two weeks as a rule. To extend a loan, update the record before the expected return date. |
| Bookings | How to reserve items people compete for | Camera and video gear must be booked by the day before it is needed. If bookings overlap, the earlier booking takes priority. Anyone who wants the other person to give way should discuss it with them directly. |
| Approval | Which items need approval in advance | As a rule, no approval is needed. Borrowing equipment with a purchase price of ¥100,000 or more requires approval from the person responsible. |
| Taking items off-site | Who decides, and what to check | When taking equipment off-site, record where it is going. Before a laptop leaves the premises, check that screen lock and disk encryption are turned on. |
| Who can borrow | Whether some items are limited to certain people | Only members of the video team may borrow camera and video gear. When another team needs it, a video team member borrows it and stays with it while it is in use. |
| Passing items on | What happens when someone other than the borrower uses an item | If the borrower hands an item to someone else, the borrower on the record must be changed to that person. |
The narrower you make the approval row, the more likely people are to follow it. If every loan needs approval, nobody can borrow anything on days when the approver isn’t around, and before long, taking things without approval becomes normal. A realistic line is to require approval only for expensive equipment and for taking items off-site, and simply record everything else.
If your company handles personal data, the off-site row is one you can’t leave out. In Japan, the Personal Information Protection Commission’s guidelines (General Rules volume) require that when electronic media or similar items containing personal data are carried around, safe measures are taken so the personal data can’t easily be revealed, and they give encryption and password protection as examples. If your lending rules cover taking laptops or USB drives off-site, name the settings to check, as in the sample wording, so borrowers know exactly what to look at.
Decide where items go back, down to the shelf number. When an item comes back, two checks are enough: whether all the accessories are there, and whether there is any visible damage. If you add a function test to the rules, every return takes longer, and eventually people skip the checks altogether.
Write down who contacts the borrower when a return is late, and when. Something like “the person responsible contacts the borrower on the next business day after the expected return date” works fine. If you also decide that anyone who wants more time must update the record before the expected return date, extension requests start arriving before you have to chase anyone.
Here’s what to put in a check-out record, plus a free Excel template (in Japanese) where overdue returns turn red automatically.See how to build an equipment check-out sheetHow to set return deadlines, send reminders before they’re due, and follow up once they’re overdue is covered in a separate article.Read how to prevent forgotten returnsThings people tend to bring from home, like camera gear, tools and monitors, often end up on the same shelf as company equipment. Make it a rule that personal items used for work are declared to the person responsible and entered in the register with the employee as the owner. The point isn’t to treat them as company equipment. It’s to keep a record of whose they are. When someone leaves or changes roles, a single list shows which items they’re free to take home.
If people use their own PCs or smartphones for work, that’s easier to handle in your information security policy than in the equipment rules. Put a single sentence in the equipment rules that points to that policy. What happens when a personal item breaks during work is hard to settle in advance for every case, so just write that declared personal items are dealt with case by case with the person responsible.
Start the rules on loss and damage with the reporting deadline. Report to the person responsible on the same day you notice, and the person responsible then changes the item’s status in the register to lost or under repair. Once the status changes, anyone trying to book that item finds out it’s unavailable before they need it.
What you want to avoid is a setup where the person who reports gets blamed. If reporting a loss means writing a formal letter of apology, people who lose something will keep searching on their own before they report it, and the loss comes to light weeks late. Treat only late reporting as a problem, and for the loss itself, simply record what happened. People won’t know where that line is drawn unless you put it in writing.
For devices that hold data, like laptops and smartphones, add one more step. On the same day, tell the IT contact as well as the person responsible, so they can decide whether the device needs to be locked remotely or accounts suspended. If the device held personal data, make sure the internal reporting route for that can be found from this part of the rules too.
Avoid setting amounts in advance, such as a flat sum someone must pay for any lost item. In Japan, Article 16 of the Labor Standards Act prohibits employers from setting penalties for breach of an employment contract or entering into contracts that fix the amount of damages in advance. If you want to say anything about compensation, check with a labor and social security attorney (a sharoushi) or your company’s lawyer before you settle the wording. In the equipment rules themselves, just write that cases where compensation becomes an issue will be handled individually.
Why equipment goes missing, and how fixed storage spots, check-out records and return deadlines prevent it, is covered here.Read how to prevent lost equipmentThe rules for letting go of equipment cover the moment an item leaves the register. Without them, broken gear sits in storage for years, while items someone quietly threw away still show as available in the register. You can write the procedure in five steps.
Step 3 touches on personal information. In Japan, the Personal Information Protection Commission’s guidelines (General Rules volume) state that devices or electronic media containing personal data must be disposed of by a method that makes the data impossible to restore. The examples given are dedicated data-erasure software and physical destruction, and the examples for small and medium-sized businesses include having someone in a responsible position confirm the disposal. If you outsource the work, the guidelines also say it’s important to confirm, for example with a certificate, that the contractor has reliably erased or destroyed the data. A sale or transfer also sends the device outside the company, so it goes through the same steps.
On step 4, Article 3 of Japan’s Waste Management and Public Cleansing Act states that businesses must properly dispose of the waste their business activities generate, under their own responsibility. Which contractor to use, and on what kind of contract, should be decided by the person responsible or someone in admin after reading the guidance from the local authority where you’re based. If you allow sales or transfers to employees, agree with accounting on how prices are set and write that down too.
You keep the register row so that you can trace what happened later. In the same place, note that the asset ID of a disposed item is never reused for another item.
Build returns into the HR process for people leaving. If it’s only in the equipment rules, it won’t happen unless whoever handles the departure reads them. Add one line to the offboarding checklist: check any equipment on loan and any personal items registered to the person.
If you want the check at departure to be quick, do the work when people join. Record the PC, smartphone and building pass you issue in the same way as a loan. Then, when someone leaves, you only need to look at the list of what they have on loan, and nobody has to try to remember what was handed over.
About a week before the last working day is a safe time to check. If you only notice on the last day, there’s no time left to arrange for gear kept at home to be brought in. For PCs and smartphones you’ve issued, also decide what happens to the data once they come back (wipe them straight away, or keep them as they are for a set period).
How to handle items that aren’t returned, and whether to put the duty to return them in your employment rules or a signed pledge, varies from company to company. Talk to a labor and social security attorney before you put it in writing.
Changing roles slips through even more easily than leaving. People move to another team still holding equipment that was only meant for use within their old team, and simply keep using it. When someone changes roles, the person responsible decides whether they return what they have on loan, or whether the record is reassigned so they can keep using it in their new team.
If you look after issuing PCs and mobile routers and checking returns when people leave, there’s also an article that starts with which devices to track.Read about managing company PCs and peripheralsFor an organization of around 10 people, the first version needs these six lines. Write them in order from the top, and leave any line you can’t settle yet blank for now.
Add the maximum loan period, approval for taking items off-site, who can borrow what, and how often to run stocktakes once you’ve used the rules for a while and hit a problem. If you write everything from the start, you end up with some rules nobody can keep, and once some rules aren’t followed, people start taking the rest lightly too.
1. The person responsible for equipment is (name). In their absence, (name) acts in their place. Anything these rules do not cover is decided by the person responsible, and the decision is recorded. 2. These rules apply to equipment that has an asset ID label. Consumables such as stationery are not covered. 3. When taking equipment out, write the borrower, the asset ID and the expected return date in the check-out log. When it comes back, write the return date and put it back on its original shelf. 4. Anyone who loses or damages equipment reports it to the person responsible on the same day they notice. For devices that hold data, the IT contact must also be told. 5. The person responsible decides on disposal, sale or transfer. Devices that can hold data are wiped before they leave, and the reason and date are kept in the register. 6. When someone leaves or changes roles, they go through the equipment they have borrowed and any personal items used for work with the person responsible, no later than one week before their last working day.
Keep it as a bulleted list. Turning it into a formal policy that starts with Article 1 can wait until an audit or a client’s vendor review asks for the document. When that happens, you can move the content of the list straight into clauses.
Add one line about when to review the rules. Once a year, after the stocktake, the person responsible rereads them, removes lines nobody uses and adds exceptions that kept coming up. Put the revision date at the end of the document, so you can tell when an old version is circulating.
Keep the rules near where people pick up equipment. A policy buried deep in a shared drive gets read when it’s written and when it’s revised, and that’s about it. Post a summary on the cabinet door or put it on the first page of the check-out log, somewhere borrowers will see it.
You put the rules in writing, and six months later nobody looks at them. The reason usually lies in how the rules are set up.
If a loan can only be recorded after going back to a desk, records start slipping on the busiest days first. Check whether the step the rules require happens as part of picking up the item. Even just putting a paper check-out log next to the shelf cuts down on gaps. It doesn’t look impressive, but it beats a shared spreadsheet you have to open on your desk PC.
Someone wants to go past the maximum loan period, or lend something to another team. If nobody can decide in situations the rules don’t cover, borrowers choose to take the item without recording it. If the name of the person responsible comes first in the rules, at least nobody has to wonder who to ask.
If nobody checks whether the records are accurate, the rules exist only on paper. Set a stocktake schedule as a working check, separate from the annual count tied to your financial year-end. As a rough guide, count expensive equipment and devices that hold data once a quarter, and everything else once or twice a year. Instead of counting everything at once, split it by category, like cameras this month and PCs next month, and each round is lighter.
When an item doesn’t match the register, trace its most recent loan records. If it still can’t be found, treat it the same way as a reported loss. If unexplained mismatches turn up every time, look less at the wording of the rules and more at whether recording takes too much effort.
Start your equipment management rules by writing, on one page, the name of the person responsible and the rules for the four moments: lending, returning, losing or breaking, and letting go. Saying who decides exceptions does more to keep things running than detailed procedures.
Decide how to handle personal items and people leaving or changing roles before they cause trouble. When you dispose of or sell equipment, decide how data is wiped and how items are disposed of in line with the law and your internal policies. Then, at every stocktake, check that records are being kept accurately. Where things don’t match, decide whether it’s the wording of the rules or the effort of recording that needs fixing.
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It also has features that match the rules in this article. Each item’s owner can be set to either the workspace (the company) or a person, and you can register asset numbers. You can limit who can borrow to specific user groups (only admins can change this setting). Units you no longer use can be retired by choosing a reason, such as disposal, sale or transfer, and a date, and that stays in the history.
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