IT asset management is the ordinary work of knowing what hardware and software a company owns, who is holding each piece of it at the minute, what the whole of it costs every month, and when a thing comes back or gets switched off. Nobody sets out to start doing it. There is no morning where a company sits down and works out that it has lost the run of nine laptops and four software seats, that is not the way any of this arrives. It gathers quietly instead, over years, and then some afternoon a person opens a screen for a reason that has nothing at all to do with assets and the shape of it turns up in front of them.
Dervla found hers in February and she was only in there for a two minute job. She does IT and a fair bit of everything else at an architecture practice in Galway, sixty odd people over two floors, and a fella had left in January, so she went into the rendering software’s vendor portal to take his seat off the account. The account had nine seats on it. She sat there and named the people who used it and she got to six, and one of the three left over was the very man she had come in to remove, and the other two had gone as well, one of them the previous May. Nine seats billing every month, six of them doing any work. She had not gone looking for that at all. She had gone in to press one button and come back out.
That is the part worth sitting with, on account of it being the part everybody skips past. Not one person in the whole of that story did a careless thing. The seats were bought in a hurry, every one of them at a moment when a project needed a body on it by the Monday, by whoever had a card and the authority to use it. And a person leaving is a conversation between a manager and payroll, it was never a conversation with a vendor portal nobody remembers is there. The register was not wrong on the day it was made. A sheet does not keep its self current. It went wrong afterwards, on ordinary days, in small amounts, and each of those small amounts had a perfectly good reason sitting behind it.
IT asset management is a habit before it is ever a database
The software and the practice get called by the one name and that muddles people, so the two are worth pulling apart before anybody spends money. The system is the thing you buy. The management is what goes on inside of it, and you could say the whole of that in a breath. Somebody has to write down what came in and what it cost. Somebody has to know who is holding it now. It has to get taken back or turned off when the person or the project is finished, and the record has to be checked against the world now and then, else it turns into a story about a company that no longer exists.
Now the half nobody enjoys hearing, better said here than found out in month eight. Software is genuinely good at two of those jobs, the holding and the reminding, and it will nag you about a renewal until you want to put it through a window. Knowing that a laptop changed hands at four on a Friday runs on people. So does the taking back, and so does the checking, and all of it runs on somebody being responsible rather than on any feature that a salesperson can show you on a call. Which is how a company goes and buys a fine asset tool and owns a very tidy fiction eighteen months later. Dervla had seen that already at the place she worked before this one. There was a beautiful sheet, colour coded, conditional formatting on it and the lot, and by the second year the only thing it accurately recorded was what the world had looked like on the day the sheet was built. Nobody had touched it since.
The register goes wrong at the joins, and the joins are the good days
Take one laptop and follow it, because one machine tells this better than any diagram ever put it. It was bought in the spring for a new starter, and it went out to her inside the week, and the sheet had it right, serial number and name and date and the lot of them correct. Grand. That is the easy half and everybody manages the easy half.
Then October, and a contractor out on a site job rings in at ten past four on a Friday with a machine that will not come on at all. There is a spare in the press. The spare is that same laptop, since the starter had gone up to a bigger one in the summer and this one had come back and nobody had gone and written that down either. Dervla handed it over so the man could work on the Monday. Correct call, no two ways about it, and she would make it again tomorrow. Nobody wrote a line anywhere, on account of the job at ten past four on a Friday being a working machine in a man’s hands, it was never a tidy row in a spreadsheet.
So the machine went out in the spring under one name, came back in the summer under nobody’s, went out again in the autumn to a man who does not appear on the payroll at all, and travelled to three counties in a van. The machine did not record its self. Every move in that story was somebody being useful in a hurry. This is the thing the guides leave out and it is the whole mechanism of it, plainly said. Registers do not go wrong in the quiet weeks, when there is time and nothing much moving, they go wrong at the handovers, and a handover is exactly the moment when being helpful beats being tidy, every time, for reasons that anybody sensible would sign off on. Which lands somewhere awkward if you follow it out, so we may as well follow it out. A slow and unhelpful IT desk will tend to hold a more accurate register than a fast and generous one, on account of nothing much moving through it. That is not an argument for going slow, obviously enough, and Dervla would be the first to say so. It is an argument for making the writing down fall out of the helping rather than asking anybody to go back and do it afterwards out of virtue.
What counts as an asset turned out to be a good deal more than the laptops
Her first pass was the obvious things and it took an afternoon with a clipboard. Laptops, the two big screens on the visualisation desk, the plotter, a pile of monitors, eleven phones on a business plan. She counted the phones twice. That much anybody would think of, it is what the word asset puts in your head, and it is the part that has a serial number stamped on the side of it.
Software was where the ground moved. Seats on the rendering package, seats on the CAD, and then a whole second tier she had genuinely never seen, since project leads had been buying tools on company cards for years the way you would buy stationery. A survey app. A file transfer service for the big drawings. Something for time recording that two people used and eleven were licensed for. None of it was hidden from her, mind you, none of it was sneaky, it simply never crossed anybody’s desk as a purchase worth mentioning because forty euro a month does not feel like a purchase to the person making it. The card kept paying all the same.
The last lot were the ones with no physical form at all and no obvious owner, and they were the ones that could actually hurt. Two domain names. A certificate with a date on it that nobody was watching. Four SIM cards still active for phones that had been handed back. And a cloud storage subscription set up in 2019 and registered to a partner’s personal email, a partner who had retired in 2022, which is a sentence that ought to make anybody sit up straight in the chair. That one took a fortnight and two phone calls to a support desk to get back. She found it by accident as well, going through a card statement line by line for something else entirely.
The money was not in the hardware, and that surprised the partners
Everyone pictures this subject as chasing laptops, and the partners certainly did, one of them asking her at a meeting whether all this was really about a few missing screens. Hardware does go missing and it is worth counting, no argument there. A laptop, though, is a thing you lose the once, and then it is lost and that is the end of that particular loss. Software seats keep going out the door every month for as long as the card keeps working, quietly, and the leak never shows its self on a desk the way an empty docking station does.
Her arithmetic was dull and it did the job. Three dead seats on the renderer, two more on the CAD after she checked that one too, six paid seats on the time recording tool with nobody at all behind them. Eleven seats in total, being billed steadily, doing not one hour of work between the lot of them. Multiply whatever that costs a month by twelve and it came to more than the two laptops she never did find, several times over, and unlike the laptops it was going to keep on happening in the coming year and the year after. Gartner have put the share of software spending that goes unused at somewhere around a quarter, which sounds like a headline until you go and count your own and find your number is your number. Count yours. It takes an afternoon and it turns the budget conversation from a feeling into arithmetic, and arithmetic is the only thing that has ever worked on a partner.
There was a second return she had not costed for and could not have. Once the seats had names on them, a lead asking for a new licence got asked first whether one of the idle ones would do, and about half the time it did. The buying slowed down on its own. Nobody instructed that to happen.
Asset management, configuration management, and the queue you already have
Three words get used interchangeably in this corner and the differences only matter at the point where money moves, so here they are without ceremony. Asset management follows ownership and cost and the life of a thing, from the purchase order to the day it is wiped and gone, and it is fundamentally a finance shaped question wearing IT clothes. Configuration management, the CMDB you will hear about, is after something different, which is how the pieces depend on one another, so that when a server goes down at nine in the morning somebody can say in ten seconds what else is about to go down with it. And ITSM is the practice sitting over the top of both of them, the agreed way requests and incidents and changes get handled.
A small company does not need all three of those and should not be sold all three of them. What it needs is to notice something Dervla noticed late, which cost her a couple of months. Half the facts an asset register wants are already being generated every week, in the ordinary traffic of an IT ticketing system. A new starter needs a machine, that is a ticket. A screen is broken and swapped, ticket. Somebody asks for a licence, ticket. Somebody leaves and access gets cut, ticket again. The moment of change and the record of the change are already in the same place, at the same minute, written by the person who did it. And in most companies the ticket gets closed and the fact inside of it is thrown away, and then six months on somebody goes around with a clipboard chasing that very same fact back down again, at a cost, on an afternoon that could have been spent on anything else.
How she actually built it, and the first version was a sheet
Counting was where she started, mostly because it was the only bit she could do sitting down. She sat with the card statements for one quarter on one side and the payroll leavers list on the other, and she went and worked through the vendor portals one at a time putting a name against every seat that was being paid for. An afternoon and a bit. That afternoon found the eleven idle seats, and finding them paid for the whole project before any part of it was built, which is a handy position to be in when you go asking for anything.
Then the walk around, which she had been dreading and which took less than a day. Two floors, a clipboard, serial numbers off the underside of things, and a column for where it is and a column for whose it is. Sixteen machines she could not lay hands on that day, and eleven of those were people working from home who sent a photo when she asked. The two she never found are still sitting in the sheet marked unaccounted for, and leaving them visible on the page was deliberate, since a register that quietly tidies away the rows it cannot explain is asking you to trust it on a day when it has not earned any of that trust. They are still there. She has stopped expecting them back.
Ownership got settled next and it nearly did not get settled at all, which is the usual story with these. One name, an hour a week in the calendar where a person can see it, and the job was never to know where everything is. The job was to make sure the changes got written down by the people making them. Over here at Maxdesk we have watched a good number of these efforts fall over and they nearly all fall over in the very same spot, which is nobody owning the checking. Not one of them died of the software.
The last piece is the one that made it hold, and it was the smallest change of the lot. She stopped asking people to update a sheet. A machine going out, coming back, being swapped or wiped now happens through a ticket, since it was happening through a request anyway, and closing that ticket is what writes the line. Leavers got a short checklist with the seats and the machine and the SIM on it, and it fires the day payroll is told rather than the day IT is told, which is usually a fortnight earlier and is the entire difference. A renewal calendar went in the same week, every subscription with a date and a human name against it, nothing renewing on its own in the dark. Six weeks at a gentle pace, all told, and the sheet is still a sheet. At sixty people it holds fine.
How she knows the register is still true
Twenty minutes on the first Monday of the month covers the whole of it, and it has stayed at twenty minutes all year, funnily enough, on account of every one of the checks being small and cheap to run.
Ten machines get picked at random and she goes and physically finds them, or rings whoever has one and asks for a photo. Ten out of a hundred and something, and if nine of the ten are where the sheet says they are then the sheet is roughly honest and she moves on with her day. Two months running under that and she knows something in the process has slipped, usually a handover route she did not think of. A sample beats an audit, mind you, on account of the audit being so miserable that it happens once and never again.
Paid seats against real people is the check that pays for the twenty minutes on its own. Every seat has a name, every name is on payroll or is a contractor with an end date on their row. Anything without a name gets turned off, and if somebody shouts within the fortnight it goes back on and nobody is any the worse. It went back on twice. Nobody has shouted since.
The leaver clock is the one she watches hardest, being the leak that runs. Days from a person’s last day to the machine being back and every seat off. It ran to about six weeks before any of this and it sits inside the week now. She did not do anything clever to it. The checklist simply fires earlier than it used to, and that one number falling was the clearest sign the thing was doing real work rather than sitting there looking organised.
And the last check has no number in it at all. She goes and asks whether the thing is getting in anybody’s way. If the fitters and the leads are still going around the process to get a machine to somebody on a Friday afternoon, then the process is too heavy and it will kill its self by Christmas, and she would far rather hear that in month two than find it in a year. Ask them straight out. They will tell you a good long while before any dashboard does.
When you should not buy asset management software, and where we come into it
Here is the honest part, which the vendor material in this category leaves out for reasons you can probably work out for your own self. Under about twenty people, a shared sheet with a naming convention and one owner will carry you further than anybody wants to admit, and the discipline you learn in the sheet transfers whole to a real tool the day the sheet gets outgrown. Buying software before that day mostly buys ceremony. The rest of it is discipline, and discipline starts on a Monday for nothing. If nobody will own the checking, do not start, on account of an inaccurate register being worse than no register, since a person who trusts a wrong row goes and orders a laptop that was already sitting in a press. And the discovery agents that the bigger tools sell you on find what is on the network and only that. The machine in the van was invisible to every one of them, and the storage subscription on a retired partner’s personal email was invisible to the whole industry, and no scan anywhere was ever going to tell Dervla that a laptop changed hands at four on a Friday.
Past a certain size the case gets boringly strong, though, and here is our one mention of ourselves, kept where it belongs and kept honest. Maxdesk is not an asset register and we are not going to pretend to be one, there is no assets module in it and none coming that we can promise you. What we are is the place the change actually happens, which is a ticketing system with a shared queue in front of it, and the reason we are worth a mention on this particular page is the pricing rather than the features. Nothing of ours is charged per agent, the free plan is $0 with unlimited agents on it, so the office manager and whoever handles payroll and the person who holds the company card can all sit in the same queue as IT. That reads like a pricing detail and it is not one, or it is not only one, because the facts an asset register wants are mostly held by finance and by whoever waves a new starter through the door on their first morning, and per seat pricing is the plain reason those people are not in your helpdesk and never have been. Automations can fire the leaver checklist off the same trigger everything else uses, and a knowledge base will hold the handover steps so the answer does not live in one head.
There are trades and you should hear them from us rather than find them yourself with an eyebrow up. The free workspace carries supporting ads and puts Maxdesk branding on outbound email, and the one that actually matters for this subject is retention, so we will say it plainly. Free keeps three months of rolling ticket, report and audit history. An asset trail wants to be longer than three months, no two ways about it, since the question you eventually ask is who had this machine two years ago. Pro is $20 a workspace a month and takes that to twelve months, Elite is $99 and takes it to twenty four, and if none of that suits then the sheet plus the tickets is a perfectly respectable answer and we would rather say so than sell you something sideways.
Whatever you land on, ours or anybody else’s, the advice this page really stands on costs nothing and takes an afternoon. Open one vendor portal, the one you pay the most to, and write down every seat on the account. Put a human name beside each one. Then take that list to whoever runs payroll and go and check the names against it your own self. Most lists come back short. Most people doing this the first time find something inside the hour, and it is generally not the thing they expected to find when they sat down. Dervla still gets the Friday afternoon emergencies and she still goes and hands over the spare machine out of the press, mind you, and long may she. The difference is that the handover is a ticket now, and the ticket writes the line she used to have to remember, on a Monday, about a Friday she was too busy to think about.