When taking a physical inventory, users will go from room to room in a building and scan or manually enter each asset found. This is typically much easier and more efficient using a purpose-built mobile device with a built-in barcode scanner. Alternatively, on an Android or iOS device, the phone camera can take pictures of, and read the barcodes.
It is recommended to use the mobile Take function described in the Mobile Functions section of this document. However, users can take an inventory on a PC or laptop by navigating to the Take tab.
A list of all assets will display in the grid until location filters are selected.
Select the Company, Building and Room where the assets reside. If only one Company exists in the system, only the Building and Room fields will display.
When a user selects a Room, only the assets listed as located in that Room in the database will be displayed with Unfound assets defaulted to the top of the list. This gives the user an idea of the assets that they should look for during the inventory.
A user can scan, type or photograph the Asset ID or Serial #. These values are case sensitive.
Once entered, the asset details will be displayed. A user can make any other changes needed to the Asset (i.e. assignment to a new Person or Department etc.) and then click Save to mark the asset as Found.
The user can then scan the next asset in the room and repeat the process until all assets found in that room are updated.
Moving to the next room, the user should change the room value to the new location and continue repeating the process as detailed above.
If the asset was found in a different room than the system expected, the system will prompt a message with a choice to update the asset’s Room value to the new room or keep the previous Room value.
If the asset is new to the system, the system will prompt a message and ask if you want to add the asset. If “yes” is clicked, enter the new Asset ID and any other relevant data then click Save to both create the asset and mark it as found.
If using an asset tracking system for the first time, this can be an efficient way to create asset data in the system. Often, new users will order pre-printed, sequential barcode labels or create their own and peel off the first label, tag the first asset, scan the barcode, and enter the asset information. This process is then repeated until all assets are tagged and entered in the system. This is more comprehensively detailed in the Printing section of this document.