Asset Management

Asset management is a crucial part of understanding where company-owned items are and making decisions about them. A fixed asset management and tracking system is relevant to rental companies, building contractors, production companies, installation contractors and many other industries. Proper management of assets is crucial for any business, especially those that involve equipment or other assets that may move around.

Whether a small business, government agency, university, hospital or multinational corporation, any organization must keep track of its fixed and current assets. One accurate, efficient and cost-effective way to do this is with asset tracking with barcode labels and scanners. Anything that can be labeled or tagged can be barcoded. Most asset management software can leverage existing barcodes, such as the serial number barcode on computers or other electronics. They can also create custom barcode labels and print them.

With the help of asset tracking software, businesses of all types can achieve effective asset management and reap the benefits.

What Is Asset Management?

Asset management refers to the management of all physical assets in a company. It generally covers fixed assets that a company owns but doesn't sell to customers. Examples of fixed assets might include equipment for a manufacturing plant, medical devices used in a hospital, heavy equipment used on a construction site and laptops distributed to company employees. By identifying and tracking these items, you can collect real-time data about what you own, where it is and how you're using it.

Barcode inventory tracking systems are pervasively used in asset management software. But the barcode system itself is only the mechanism to label and scan items during physical inventory auditing or as they move from location to location. The asset inventory tracking software is the system that employs the labels and scans to give you up-to-date information about where your assets are currently located. It can also help you determine which assets you'll require later based on reservations, and you can use other ways to track fixed assets based on your operational needs.

Asset tracking software provides businesses with a variety of benefits, such as:

Preventing material loss through theft or asset misplacement.
Alerting you to where your assets currently are.
Telling you if you've got enough equipment for future jobs.
Enabling you to improve your logistics based on asset requirements and availability.
Lowering on-hand inventory by enhancing material tracking, thereby improving your bottom line.

Ways to Track Fixed Assets

Every business needs to track its fixed assets somehow. For some, all fixed assets remain in one building or office and move between rooms. Others have large volumes of internal resources that travel around buildings and even across state and country lines. Because every company has unique needs, there are a few different approaches to asset tracking. Your business must find the best way to track fixed assets based on your operations. Your options include:

Inventory management software: One of the easiest ways to track your assets is through inventory management software. The right fixed asset tracking solution makes it easy to input and access data when you need it. If you're shipping fixed assets from one warehouse to another, you can update your records in a few clicks.
Barcode scanning: Barcode asset tracking is the industry standard because it can eliminate many manual inputs. When assets travel a lot between sublocations, such as computer equipment at an office or university, barcode tracking makes it easy to update records with a few quick scans.
Spreadsheets: If your company doesn't have too many assets that move from place to place, you may be able to get away with manual tracking via spreadsheet. Even if you use software for asset tracking, a spreadsheet could be a good place to track assets' monetary values and calculate annual depreciation.
Manual asset audits: Conducting a physical count of your fixed assets across all locations is essential no matter what tracking system you use. Sometimes, team members may forget to scan a barcode or mark an asset's current location. A barcode inventory management application makes it easy to conduct stock-taking of your fixed assets. Workers can scan all the items and their current locations and clear up any discrepancies between the record and the actual count. It's best practice to do these manual checks once or twice a year.

Best Practices for Utilizing Asset Management Software

If you're getting started with assets management for the first time, it's helpful to understand some of the industry standards and practices. As you learn how to keep track of fixed assets in a way that makes sense for your business, you'll encounter many different asset management techniques. Check out a few best practices to keep in mind:

Use the right software: Dependable, efficient software can make your asset tracking most effective and help your business conduct proper asset management. Make sure your team is well-trained in using the software for the best results.
Start fresh: If you're moving over to a new system, be sure to conduct an audit and start off on the right foot. You don't want to carry over assets in the books no longer in the company, inefficient systems or incorrect quantities.
Use well-integrated hardware and software: Not all hardware and software platforms will play nicely with each other. Make sure your scanners, tags, label printers and other tools sync up well with your software.
Employ your other business tools for optimized asset management: Use your asset tracking software alongside other tools, such as accounting software, to optimize value and better understand your assets.

How Finale Inventory Can Support Equipment Tracking of Fixed Assets

Finale Inventory is an asset management and inventory control system with several features that make it easy to track your assets' locations and other relevant data. This platform includes the following asset tracking capabilities.

Barcode Scanning

Our barcode scanner solution is easy to configure for asset tracking. Once set up, it lets workers log the current locations for your fixed assets by scanning barcodes representing each sublocation involved in a stock transfer. You can use assets' existing barcodes or print your own labels.

Shipping Assets

When you are shipping fixed assets from one business location to another, you can log the transfer directly from the Finale Inventory app. Once you submit a stock transfer, the number of assets will automatically subtract from the origin and add to the destination.

Scheduling Transfers

When you move assets between warehouses, it's usually not instantaneous. Using the Finale Inventory stock transfer feature, you can schedule asset transfers in advance so the records will update upon the assets' arrival in their new location. This feature offers the added advantage of letting you see where your assets will be at a particular time.

Manufacture Date Tracking

When tracking fixed assets, it's often helpful to know how old equipment is. You can figure out what items are old and need maintenance or replacement. This knowledge is particularly handy with assets like audiovisual equipment. Since technology may become outdated within a few years, seeing how old your assets are lets you determine what upgrades and new purchases you'll need to plan for. In Finale Inventory, you can assign items to batch numbers or manufacture dates, making it easy to track how old your assets are.

The Benefits of Asset Inventory Management With Finale Inventory

With the Finale Inventory asset management system, you'll get a range of benefits, including:

World-class customer service: Our clients get paired with a customer relationship manager, who serves as your point of contact and is there to help with consulting, training and customization needs. We'll teach you the ins and outs of the platform and offer comprehensive support personalized to your company's unique needs.
Flexibility: Finale is light, fast and highly adaptable. Wherever your business moves in the future, Finale can move with it, thanks to scalability in the cloud and no need for on-site servers and IT equipment. Plus, with customization options and a huge selection of features, we can help you configure your platform for evolving requirements.
Low commitment: Finale pricing runs month-to-month with no commitment or set-up costs, so you can pay for what you need as you need it.
Reliable data access: Encrypted, up-to-date information allows you to trust its accuracy and security. Cloud-based access also provides a seamless experience, centralizing your data into a server that you can access from any device.

Asset Tracking Capabilities

Finale Inventory supports tracking for equipment and other fixed assets that may change locations. This short video shows the asset tracking capability using the transfer stock operations.

The Importance of Professional Assistance and Expert Integrations

A lot of the principles involved in asset tracking are similar to those involved in inventory management. But because you are not usually selling and replenishing these items, you'll use the software a little differently. You also need to track different information on your fixed assets.

You may want to capture information about your assets' service history or whose possession they are in at any given time. Adding custom fields to your inventory management software can let you track more details about your assets at the individual level. To get the most out of your asset tracking software, it pays to work with a consultant who understands the software well. They can recommend ways to make your asset tracking workflow more manageable and valuable.

Tracking fixed assets has particular importance for accounting and tax purposes. That's because there are different types of assets in inventory control. Fixed assets are tracked separately from current assets like inventory. For accounting purposes, your inventory control assets are items your business plans to unload and turn into cash within the next 12 months. Fixed assets will serve a useful, income-generating purpose within your business for at least one year.

Because fixed assets last longer than one year, they will appear on your taxes differently, factoring in depreciation for each year you've owned them.

This distinction and added complexity make an expert integration with QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online essential. If your business has traditional inventory and fixed assets, you must ensure the information flows down into your accounting software correctly. Working with an inventory management platform that supports custom application programming interface (API) integrations is critical. Flexible software architecture and a helpful support team can ensure your accounting and asset tracking software communicate with each other correctly. This integration can simplify and eliminate manual data entry.

If you transfer fixed assets between locations, you may also need your software to integrate with a shipping management solution. Again, since you'll be shipping property between business locations rather than from your warehouse to a customer, your information must flow down correctly. An expert support representative and software consultant can help you ensure fixed asset transfers flow down to any shipping management software and vice versa. They can also guide you through a custom integration if necessary.

Finale Inventory can work with you to ensure smooth, seamless integrations with your other business tools. We can recommend third-party developers and act as consultants to help you get the most out of your asset tracking software. We offer free training with any paid plan and can help you learn how to track fixed assets using our inventory management software.

Sign up for a Demo or Free Trial From Finale Inventory

Finale Inventory is a powerful inventory management software that's flexible and adaptable for many use cases. We also have a turnkey barcode management solution that lets you scan and track your assets as employees sign them out or they get transferred to new locations. Our expert support team can guide you in implementing our software to track your assets most effectively. We also offer low-commitment month-to-month plans with no costly setup fees, making it easy to start using Finale Inventory as your fixed asset tracking system.

If you want to see if Finale Inventory is the best fixed asset tracking software for you, you schedule a live demo to see our barcode solution and asset tracking capabilities in action.

Video Transcript

Hi, this is Jayson with Finale Inventory. And today, I’m going to teach you a little bit about your asset management within Finale. Okay, so right here, we’re on our Finale homepage. And we’re going to go ahead and I’m going to navigate this over to our stock page. And now, I’ve already set us up. I have three different assets here. I have a desk, I have a laptop, and then I have a chair. And I want to track these across multiple locations. And so the very first thing you need to do is you need to make sure you have your location set up in Finale. So if you go to our Application settings and then we go to Facility, you can see that I have three different locations set up, which is my storage warehouse, my Las Vegas location, and my Los Angeles location. And today what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be transferring from our storage warehouse into our Los Angeles location.

So now if we go back, we can go to our View stock. I have 25 chairs, 25 laptops, and 25 desks. And the only thing that is different between these pieces of assets is my Mac laptops are actually serialized inventory. So that makes it a little bit more unique in terms of tracking, and so I’m going to show you how it’s done. So the first thing you’re going to want to do is you’re going to want to go to inventory, and we’re going to go down to our stock transfers. And then from here, we’re going to click Batch stock transfers. Next, I want us to go to the Create Batch stock transfer. And now we’re on the transfer page. Now, there are two ways to go about doing this. You can do this one by one or you can do this in bulk. So in doing it one by one, the very first thing we’re going to need to select is our shipment origin. And this is going to be our storage warehouse. Next, we want to select our shipment destination, which would be Los Angeles.

And then next, what you’re going to need to do is to tell Finale how many pieces you’ll be shipping. And so what we’re going to do is we’re going to ship 10. So we would input 10 here. And now the next section you want to select is you need to select the destination sublocation. So we double-click in here, get rid of the required. We’ll see a selection available. So now we’re going to go ahead and double-click LA. And then we’ll go ahead and put 10 down here. And I’ll show you the little trick that’ll update later. So if you put 10 here. We’ll leave this blank as required. Because now what we could do is if we wanted to update all the destination sublocations, we click Batch update sublocation, select our sublocation, and update shipment. And now you’ll see it went from required, and now it’s selected that Los Angeles sublocation.

Now, I did mention that there is a difference in the inventory I had. I had some serialized inventory, which are Mac laptops. So if we go ahead and click this little triangle, we’ll see that we have these various lot IDs. And so we actually have to select them one by one to tell Finale which ones we will be sending to our LA destination. So if we’re going to go ahead and select one here. We can go ahead and select the first few. Now, we could also use the trick that we learned earlier to batch update the sublocations. And you would see that they would update here.

Now, if you were doing quite, you know, a lot of pieces, you know, going one by one could be a bit difficult. So what we also have available is the ability to update it through a spreadsheet. And I’ve already prepared that spreadsheet. And so the first place we’re going to go through is to be able to paste that information in. We’re going to go to our actions. We’re going to click import transfer. And so here is where we would input our information. So the only thing you would need to do is prepare your spreadsheet. Now, you would need a product ID column, a quantity column. You need an origin sublocation column and a destination sublocation column. Now, if you are going to be using serialized inventory, you must use this lot ID column. So now what we’re going to do is we’re going to highlight everything. We’re going to copy it. I’ll move this off-screen. We’re going to go ahead and paste it in here. Then we’re going to go ahead and clicking Next.

So now we’ve actually loaded up our transfer. So now we’ll actually begin the transfer. So the first thing you need to do to start the sending is to ship the shipment. So this would be, hey, these are leaving my storage warehouse and they’re on their way to the Los Angeles destination. So we’ll click Ship shipment. So you click the date that it’ll ship. We’ll select today. And then now it is actually in transit and it’s no longer available as inventory within your storage warehouse. Now, when it does arrive to your LA destination, so say it’s a day in the future, and you know that your assets have arrived at your LA destination. So what we’re going to want to do is we want to go to our Inventory. We’re going to go to Stock transfers, click Batch stock transfers. And now what you’ll notice is you have this status here where it says shipped because now we know that they are in route. And so what we’re going to do is we want to click on our shipment ID. And then we’re going to want to go to Receive shipment. Select the date that it’s received. We’ll receive it the same day.

And now we’ve moved our assets from our storage warehouse to our Los Angeles destination. And you can get a verification of that by looking at your View stock screen. Okay, so we go to our View stock. And so if we go ahead and use our location filter and we select Storage Warehouse, one thing I want you to point your eyes to is that our quantity on hand and available columns are at 15, which…and they originally had started at 25 and it’s because we sent 10 to our LA destination. And so now if we look at our LA destination, we will see the 10 available. And so now we’ve successfully transferred our assets from one location to the other, and they’re always available. And just as a point, to see the serialized numbers that are available, we’re going to go ahead and click our little plus sign here. And we can see that these are associated with our LA location. And that’s it.