Managing Your Company’s Assets: Beyond the Spreadsheet Approach
We’ve all used them, spreadsheets, whether it’s to do a simple list of items, or whether you are looking to create advanced sums for business forecasts. Despite being a pain to use and not having all our required features, we still use them for our work. No doubt the reason for this is because we would rather use a free package that came with our PC, instead of buying a new one that’s more suitable for the job.
Although spreadsheets have their downsides, they do have advantages and are useful for a number of uses. The main advantages are that they can manage simple math calculations, create visual graphs and finally create easy to manage business forecasts. They all tend to be useful for certain tasks. However, due to the large number of problems spreadsheets have, they simply are not appropriate for tasks like tracking your fixed assets.
Despite it sounding like a very good tool for storing asset data, it’s just not as complex as an asset tracking solution.
To a certain extent, a spreadsheet can prove to be useful for tracking assets, however, once you start wanting to store more data about more assets, the spreadsheet is no longer useful.
Here are some handy features that you should look out for in your asset management software.
- They are required to store enough in-depth data about your items. Although a standard spreadsheet has the ability to store vasts amount of data, in some cases it may not be sufficient. The information stored might not be in enough detail as required.
- It must be able to reflect the structure of the company, no matter how complex. If the asset can be placed in a number of categories within the company, a simple spreadsheet cannot handle this complex structure.
- They should be flexible enough to restructure easily. Once a spreadsheet becomes very complex, it’s difficult to try and modify the data and especially the structure.
- They should be able to calculate different depreciation rates on individual items. If a number of assets were linked together, however they had been bought at different times, such as a computer, keyboard and mouse. The software should be advanced enough to calculate a range of price depreciation factors.
- The software should be able to do re-lifeing of business assets. If you are re-assessing assets and find that an item has now become useful, you should be able to alter the depreciation levels for that item.
- The software should be able to create structured data reports. Spreadsheets are not good for creating structured graphical reports.
Those were just a few of the points that a specifically designed asset management software package must include. Also, it’s the primary reason why a bog standard spreadsheet package is no good for storing asset data and managing it within a fixed asset inventory.
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