Gone are the days of pencil and paper tracking, handwriting spreadsheets, and updating software by floppy disks. In today’s modern world school’s need new ways to easily manage their assets.
Why Is Asset Management So Important?
Storing data in one place
Excel or google sheets are great for campuses, but having too many spreadsheets to follow, or too many contributors to a live doc can get messy and mistakes will happen. With school asset management software, everything is on a centralized register that can be accessed from anywhere, giving a single source of truth that is easy to track.
Prevent property loss
1 billion dollars of equipment goes missing every year. With a barcode or RFID technology, you can track your school’s assets and avoid misplacement or theft. Tracking software can help your IT and the instructional teams know where a piece of equipment is and who is responsible for it at all times.
Avoid excess purchases
By tracking what you have and what you have available, you can avoid unnecessary purchases and save your organization money. This not only allows you to stretch your budget further but also allows for better informed decisions for budget allocation and what assets need to be prioritized for purchase.
Prevent or manage equipment breakdowns
Your IT department will not only know who is assigned to what devices, but also how old it is, their condition, and the location of the device. Knowing all of this information makes it easier to determine what maintenance the device may need, and will help get the device fixed quickly if it does need repairs.
Keep your software up to date
By knowing what software updates your assets have and need, you will be able to reduce the risk of security breaches on your devices. Having a dedicated school asset management system will help make this task easier. Most systems will give you an easy to read report that will tell you when an asset needs to be updated, it’s last update, and the current version it is on.
Maintain asset visibility so you’re able to use what you have
Tracking assets lets educators know what is available to them so they can create a technology-enhanced learning experience. If you have the assets, but teachers do not know they exist, they are just useless pieces of equipment. IT directors need to be able to track them for maintenance purposes. School leaders need to know how much to budget for technology needs, so they don't over or under budget due to missing assets. All of this is an impossible task without having the ability to track the assets and know what is available for your staff to use. School IT asset management can give you easy to read reports for any staff member to get the information they need.
Worried that you are just a small district and school IT asset management software may be out of your budget? AssetRemix has made it easy for you to check the return on your investment.
Pitfalls of Manually Tracking Assets
Manual data entry is prone to mistakes.
When typing in the information that you need to track, how many times does the product switch from letters to numbers and back again? This is prone to having wrong or misplaced characters.
Excel spreadsheets tend to be clunky.
While Excel or Google spreadsheets are made to keep information stored in numerous columns, they were not designed to continuously track budgets and barcodes. They require constant changes to column size and equations to allow you to effectively navigate through managing your inventory.
Districts can lose control of their IT inventory though.....
Technology equipment gets shipped to a campus or department immediately instead of IT.
Some districts rely on the campus or department personnel to keep complete track of their inventory through an excel spreadsheet. (FYI, not everyone is great at these)
A lack of mandatory inventory reconciliation
Transfer or disposal of equipment is not recorded.
For these reasons, and many others, choosing the correct school asset management system like AssetRemix for your district is extremely important.