Interested to hear how other organizations manage physical inventory of their fixed assets for US and global locations, including assets at third party locations.
How often do you perform a count? Does your organization use electronic asset tags? Do you set thresholds, or 100% coverage? Do you engage a third party? What are you challenges? What works well?
Oracle ERP System Analyst / Accounting Manger in Retail2 years ago
My company is an owner/operator of 1k+ childcare centers. Due to the nature of our primarily lower-value (non-IT) assets, we try to cover 3%-5% of our schools with a physical count performed by each location’s director each year which is still admittedly quite low. The IT technology uses barcodes for tracking and technology such as pinging our iPads monthly and physically inquiring into any iPads that didn't respond.
We only engage 3rd parties for counts when a school is subject to an insurance loss such as a fire or flood, where a restoration crew will physically inventory all items, documenting what can be salvaged and what is to be discarded.
Large dollar assets such as HVAC equipment or movable building equipment is surveyed annually by our contract maintenance (we use a national maintenance provider).
Outside of physical counts, the fixed asset team analytically reviews assets by location to find outliers that may be indicators of older assets that weren't disposed (such as using metrics like the NBV per square foot).
The most difficult part - poor asset descriptions end up just resulting in good assets being disposed of. Being in 37 states with easily movable assets primarily consisting of mostly lower-cost FFE means that there must be theft, but we have no way to quantify it and the level of effort to increase our counts/coverage just wasn't worth the spend.
I would suggest that if you were to engage a third party, to help them be as successful as possible, you would want your asset descriptions to be clear unless the people counting understand your business and have the knowledge to differentiate between your assets.
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My company is an owner/operator of 1k+ childcare centers. Due to the nature of our primarily lower-value (non-IT) assets, we try to cover 3%-5% of our schools with a physical count performed by each location’s director each year which is still admittedly quite low. The IT technology uses barcodes for tracking and technology such as pinging our iPads monthly and physically inquiring into any iPads that didn't respond.
We only engage 3rd parties for counts when a school is subject to an insurance loss such as a fire or flood, where a restoration crew will physically inventory all items, documenting what can be salvaged and what is to be discarded.
Large dollar assets such as HVAC equipment or movable building equipment is surveyed annually by our contract maintenance (we use a national maintenance provider).
Outside of physical counts, the fixed asset team analytically reviews assets by location to find outliers that may be indicators of older assets that weren't disposed (such as using metrics like the NBV per square foot).
The most difficult part - poor asset descriptions end up just resulting in good assets being disposed of. Being in 37 states with easily movable assets primarily consisting of mostly lower-cost FFE means that there must be theft, but we have no way to quantify it and the level of effort to increase our counts/coverage just wasn't worth the spend.
I would suggest that if you were to engage a third party, to help them be as successful as possible, you would want your asset descriptions to be clear unless the people counting understand your business and have the knowledge to differentiate between your assets.