Nine fields, not sixty

An asset template with sixty fields produces records with thirty filled in, half of them wrong, and nobody trusting any of it. Nine fields do the work. Everything else should have to earn its way in.

The nine

• •Name, in the pattern used everywhere
• •Location, precise enough to walk to
• •Type, from a short list you can group by
• •Make, model and serial, ideally from a photograph of the plate
• •In service date and expected life
• •Replacement cost today
• •Criticality band
• •Responsible person or team
• •Scannable code

How to add a tenth

Somebody will ask monthly. Two questions decide it: which decision changes because of this field, and who fills it in. If the answer to the second is "whoever adds the asset", ask whether they will know it. A field that only the manufacturer knows will be blank forever, and a blank field trains people to skip fields.

Fields that sound useful and are not

• •Purchase order number, which lives in the finance system where somebody can look it up
• •Warranty length in months, when what you need is the end date
• •Free text "notes", which becomes the place information goes to be lost
• •Colour, weight, dimensions, unless you move the thing
• •Department, which changes and belongs as an ownership property rather than as identity

Fill in what you can, and mark the rest unknown

A blank field and a field marked unknown look the same and mean different things. Marked unknown, it can be counted and chased. Left blank, it is indistinguishable from a field nobody has got to yet, and both get ignored.

Judge the list by what it can answer

Not by how complete it looks. If you can answer what you own, where it is, what condition it is in, what it costs to keep and when it needs replacing, the register is finished, however many fields are empty.