How far should you track company laptops and peripherals such as monitors, mobile hotspots and headsets one unit at a time? This guide covers drawing the line by whether a device is assigned to a person or leaves the office, keeping records from a hire's first day to their last, checking returns when someone leaves, how many spares to keep, and how the work splits with IT asset management software.
An employee is leaving, and on their last day in the office the laptop comes back. The AC adapter and the mobile hotspot are another story: they can't remember whether they still have them. The only record of what they were given when they joined was a single line with the laptop's asset ID. The laptop is in the register, but the peripherals handed over with it aren't written down anywhere. Most people find this out on return day.
That said, you don't need to track every peripheral one by one. Track individual units only for things assigned to a specific person or taken outside the office, and just count the rest. Conversely, we think any device that fits either of those should get a number and be tracked, even if it costs only a few thousand yen. At a company of roughly 30 to 300 employees, the person who handles both office administration and IT often ends up owning everything from ordering laptops to collecting devices from leavers on their own, and rarely has time to track every item individually.
Beyond the company laptop, here is what an admin who covers both office administration and IT typically gives employees.
Of these, the PC itself may be recorded as a fixed asset in the accounting ledger and given an asset number, depending on what it cost. Monitors and keyboards are a different matter. Under Japan's corporate tax rules, a depreciable asset that costs less than 100,000 yen can be deducted in full in the year it is put into use, provided it is expensed in the books that year. Below 200,000 yen, a company can also choose to treat it as a bulk depreciable asset written off evenly over three years (National Tax Agency of Japan, Tax Answer No. 5403). Most peripherals fall within these ranges, and once they are expensed they leave no trace in the accounting ledger.
IT asset management software usually collects information through an agent installed on each PC, so a monitor sitting at someone's home or a headset on the spare shelf tends to fall outside its view. The only person who can record which employee's home a 20,000-yen monitor is in is the admin who handed it over.
We cover which fields a register should have, and where to draw the line with consumables, in a separate article.What is equipment management? Purpose, register fields and methodsThe line isn't about price. It comes down to two questions. Do you hand the device to a specific person? Does it leave the office? If either answer is yes, give it a number and track it unit by unit. If neither is, knowing how many you have is enough.
Draw the line by price and a mobile hotspot that costs between 10,000 and 20,000 yen ends up on the counting side. But each hotspot is tied to its own data contract, and if one is lost you have to get that line suspended. If you don't know which unit went to whom and when, you can't tell which line to suspend. On the other hand, a meeting-room monitor may cost 50,000 yen, but as long as the room has as many as it should, nobody has a problem.
| Device | Tracked by | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Laptops, desktop PCs | Unit | Assigned to a person. Matched against the accounting asset number and the device record in IT asset management software |
| Company smartphones | Unit | Assigned to a person and taken outside the office. Each phone number is tied one-to-one to a handset |
| Mobile hotspots | Unit | Taken outside the office. If one is lost, you need to identify which line to suspend |
| Monitors and docking stations taken home for remote work | Unit | While they are off site, knowing whose home they're in is the only clue to where they are |
| Monitors that stay at desks or in meeting rooms | Count (per location) | They never leave the office. Count how many are in each location |
| Headsets | Count | They go on people's ears, so if your policy is not to ask for them back, the number handed out and the number left are enough |
| Webcams | Count, as a rule | Count them if they're handed to individuals with no return expected. Shared ones for meeting rooms or lending are tracked by unit |
| Keyboards, mice | Count | Cheap, and simply replaced when they break. Top up when stock runs low |
| AC adapters, dongles, cables | Recorded as PC accessories | Not tracked on their own. List them in the notes on the PC's record and check they're all there on return |
For a device that isn't in the table, decide by asking whether you'd go and ask someone about it if one went missing. If nobody would ask around when a keyboard goes missing, leave keyboards as a count. If you would ask, record it by unit so you can look up who to ask in the register.
Counted items can be handled with a single sheet listing how many are at each location. Set a reorder level for each item and order more when stock drops below it. It's the same idea as managing inventory.
On top of the basic register fields (asset ID, item name, model number, storage location, condition), give anything you assign to a person the following fields. You won't have to guess when it comes back or goes to someone new.
For status values, we recommend adding “awaiting wipe” between returned and spare. If a returned PC goes straight back to spare, a machine still holding the previous user's data sits on the spare shelf, and on a busy day it gets handed to the next person as is. The status values enforce the order: a device moves to spare only once it has been wiped and the date written down.
Devices tracked by unit move in step with one employee's time at the company. You record something when a device goes into someone's hands and when it leaves them.
Once a PC has its OS and apps configured (provisioning, sometimes called kitting), treat it as sitting on the spare shelf until the start date. When you hand it over on day one, reassign the PC, docking station, hotspot and any other unit-tracked devices to that person in one go. Accessories such as the AC adapter can be listed in the notes on the PC's record, so you can check them on return.
Whether you also collect a signature on receipt varies by company, but you should at least show the employee a list of what they've been given. If it comes down to “I never received that” when they leave, that list is the only thing you'll have to go on.
On day one, along with the devices, tell them who to contact if something breaks and the usage rules, such as whether they may plug a company monitor into a personal PC. Rules given verbally leave no record, so put them on the same sheet or in the same email as the list of devices. That way there's one place to check later.
When you swap out a faulty PC, record the replacement going to the employee and the broken PC going into repair on the same day. Record only one and the register will show that person holding either two machines or none. Decide on the spot whether the repaired PC goes back to that person or into spares, and write that down too.
With a transfer, the devices usually don't come back at all; the person keeps using the same PC in their new department. You don't need a return record, but if you forget to update the department or location fields, the location won't match at the next stocktake. Only when the person switches to a different model in the new role do you record a return and an issue on the same day.
Devices for remote work and for business trips both leave the office, but things run more smoothly if you record them differently. What separates them is whether the device is expected to come back.
Monitors, docking stations, webcams and so on. They don't come back while the person keeps working from home
Mobile hotspots, loaner laptops, presentation adapters and so on. They come back within a few days
Put a return deadline on remote-work equipment and every deadline brings the chore of extending it. Eventually nobody bothers, and you end up with a list full of overdue loans that nobody acts on. If you only set deadlines on things that are meant to come back, an overdue flag tells you there's something you actually need to deal with.
You can't go and look at devices kept in people's homes, so the realistic approach is to have each person report on them once a year. Ask for a photo that shows the label with the asset ID, and you also avoid misread numbers.
When you lend a device for use outside the office, also give the person the contact and the steps to follow if they lose it. For mobile hotspots and company smartphones, the sooner someone calls to suspend the line, the shorter the window for misuse. If nobody has decided who to contact at night or on weekends, the person will wait until they're back in the office the next morning.
With only a few hotspots for travel, people end up competing for them. If requests like “Can I take one on next week's trip?” come in several times a month, a handwritten log or a spreadsheet won't stop double-bookings, and it's time to move to a booking system that reserves devices by date.
Start checking returns the day you hear someone is leaving, not on their last day in the office. If you find something missing on the last day, there's no time left to get it back. And if they take their remaining paid leave, they may stop coming in before their last scheduled day in the office.
On the day you get the news, pull up a list of the devices assigned to that person. If your register can filter by name, this takes a few minutes. If it can't, you're scanning every row by eye, which can take an hour.
Skip step 4 and mark the device returned as soon as you have it, and you won't notice the missing AC adapter until the day you hand the PC to the next person. By then, the previous holder has already left the company.
If one person deactivates internal accounts and someone else collects devices, set up a way for news of a departure to reach both at the same time. If the accounts are shut off first, you can no longer reach the person by company email, which makes arranging the collection harder.
If a device still doesn't come back, whether to ask for compensation or write it off as lost is something your device loan policy or employment rules should settle. It isn't a call the admin should make on the spot. If your policy says nothing about it, use that case as the prompt to add a rule, so you aren't stuck the next time someone leaves.
A separate article goes through, item by item, how much of issuing and returns to write into your rules.Read how to set equipment management rulesIf filtering by name or tracking change history in a spreadsheet register is getting out of hand, see our criteria and steps for moving off it.When to move from Excel to a dedicated systemWith no spares at all, an employee's work stops the day their PC breaks, and sometimes setup isn't finished by the day before a new hire starts. Too many is a problem as well: a model that sits on the shelf for years is near the end of OS support by the time it's needed.
To get a rough number, take how many devices you needed over the past year because of breakdowns, losses and new hires, convert that to a monthly figure, and multiply by the number of months from ordering a device to having it ready to hand over. If you needed 18 in a year and it takes a month and a half from order to finished setup, that's 18 ÷ 12 × 1.5, or 2 to 3 devices. It's a rough calculation, but it misses by less than a guess. If most of your new hires start in April, have enough devices for everyone due to join ready by the end of March, on top of this number.
Put spares in the register too, with a status that marks them as spares. If someone takes a spare off the shelf and gives it to a person but the register still says spare, the next person looking for one ends up in front of an empty shelf. Don't count devices out for repair as spares, and change their status back the day they return. Build those two steps into your replacement procedure and the spare count in the register will keep matching what's on the shelf.
When you dispose of an old spare, don't delete its row. Mark it as disposed, and record the date, who erased the data and how. If a vendor handled the data erasure, note the number on the certificate they issue. Years later, when someone asks what happened to the data on that PC, that one row is the only answer you'll have.
IT asset management software varies in scope by product, but it generally collects what's on each device through an agent installed on the PC: OS version, installed software, license counts, update status and so on. MDM (mobile device management) pushes settings to smartphones and PCs remotely and lets you lock the screen or wipe data when a device is lost. Both assume the device is powered on and connected to a network.
Spares on a shelf, a PC at a repair shop, a monitor still at a former employee's home, a mobile hotspot that hasn't left its box: either the agent can't report on them, or there's no agent on them at all. Where the physical device is, who has it and when it's coming back has to live in a separate record.
Rather than trying to do both with one tool, it's easier to keep the two records side by side and use the asset ID as the shared key. If you also use the PC's asset ID as its hostname, then when the software flags a device that has stopped updating, you can look up in the register where it physically is. In the other direction, when a device goes missing from the register, the software can tell you when it last connected to the network.
When you run the two side by side, don't enter the same field by hand in both. Make the register the source of truth for holder and location, and the software the source of truth for OS, installed software and the last time the device connected. If you don't decide which side owns each field, then when the holder fields in the two records disagree, nobody will know which one to fix.
With around 30 employees, some companies get by without IT asset management software, using a register and a yearly stocktake. As you approach 300, tracking licenses and security updates by hand stops being workable. At either size, the register is still where peripheral locations live.
Stocktakes, where you check the register against what's physically there, don't have to be a big once-a-year job if you split the scope and work through it a bit at a time.5 ways to make equipment stocktakes fasterWhether to track a peripheral by unit depends not on its price but on whether it's assigned to a person or taken outside the office. Count keyboards and mice; track mobile hotspots and remote-work monitors one by one.
Make a record when you hand a device over, when you swap it out for repair, and when it comes back. For leavers, start by listing their devices on the day you hear the news, and mark items returned only after you've seen that all the accessories are there. Leave what's on the PC to IT asset management software and keep physical location in the register. Split things this way and the workload stays manageable for a single admin juggling both roles.
Werp™ is a cloud-based equipment management service that registers equipment unit by unit and records where each one is and when it's checked out and in. Scan the QR label printed for a device with a smartphone and that unit's page opens, where a button records a check-out or check-in. Each unit can have a storage location, owner, asset number and purchase price, and when you change the location or owner, the before and after values are kept in the history.
For trip loans, check devices out from a booking with set dates, and the borrower gets an email 24 hours before the return date and again once it has passed. Devices on loan and who has them are listed on the home screen, and admins can export the unit list, including the owner column, as CSV.
Werp™ handles physical location and check-outs and check-ins. It doesn't read the software on a PC or its OS update status. Also, only workspace members can be chosen as borrowers or owners, and paid plans are priced by the number of members. If you link every employee's PC to them individually, you'll need a member for every employee.
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