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Ask Slashdot: What Asset Tracking Software Do You Recommend?
grahamsaa writes: I work for an organization that has a number of physical assets, as well as presence in multiple data centers. On the DC side, there are a number of specific things we need to track (one thing we want to be able to account for is how much power do we need for each rack). On the office side, our needs are more basic. We need to be able to tag and track laptops, workstations, monitors, etc. I would like to use a single system for all of this, but have yet to find something that will work well on the office side and the data center side. Free/open source solutions are preferred, but we're prepared to spend money on a commercial solution if it meets our needs. What would you recommend?
Honestly, I've seen some of the most successful implementations of asset tracking implemented in trivial homegrown spreadsheets and databases. I'll also seen complete disaster and disarray in multi-million dollar commercial applications.
The difference: the people and process. When it comes to asset tracking in a dynamic, uncontrolled environment (e.g., not an Amazon warehouse), no tool is going to replace good process and procedure since there will be error-prone and lazy humans in the process. You need to get religious about these sorts of things if you want them to work. No nifty tool will substitute.
My two cents.
Speaking as an accountant, get/use something compatible with your accounting system. Find out what your accounting needs are ahead of time. Your accountants will need to have a fixed asset list for tax and reporting purposes. This is THE most important function of an asset tracking system. Whatever you do make damn sure it is easily compatible with the needs of the accounting department. Otherwise you are costing the company money and making life needlessly difficult. It may be that your accountants have modest needs like in my company - we do ours directly in our accounting software and that's fine for us. But if you are considering specialty software to keep track then chances are that you should be including your finance and accounting people in this conversation before you install anything.
Pros: Simple to setup. Customizable. Free. Cons: A bit of a learning curve getting started but the docs are good as long as you can RTFM http://racktables.org/
I've been using http://snipeitapp.com/ Pretty easy to set up on a box in digital ocean, very low maintenance after I got it all set up and working, and if you'd rather not host it yourself you can pay them to do it. Has QR code/label printing capabilities, user management, less-detailed accessory tracking for keyboards and mice (i.e. there's like 20 keyboards over in accounting, and I have 5 available, but i know who has the other 12, and that 3 are broken). Can create reports of how much stuff costed, upload receipts to each asset, when warranty expires, all kinds of stuff. My only bitch about this was how you have to fill out the model before creating an asset under that model, which meant a lot of tedious tabbing back and forth while setting it up. Now that I have all the standard models of phones, laptops, and other hardware that we buy filled it, adding a new asset and assigning it to someone takes like a minute. The developer is super responsive to bugs and questions on her github page: http://github.com/snipe/snipe-...
Pen and notebook until all that is ready.