Assignment and Tracking

A register is accurate at the moment of assignment and decays from there. Most of the decay is reassignment nobody recorded.

Recording an assignment

At handover, not afterwards. Retrospective recording does not happen.

Record: asset, person, date, location, and the accessories that went with it.

Acknowledgement from the recipient. A signature or a ticket confirmation. This matters at the return end.

Status change in the register, from in stock to in use.

Endpoint management enrolment confirmed, with the device associated to the user.

Reassignment, the recurring failure

A device passed directly from one person to another without going through IT is the standard cause of register drift.

It happens because it is convenient — a leaver hands their laptop to their replacement, a team shuffles equipment internally.

Detect it by comparing the register's assigned user against the endpoint management system's primary user. A mismatch is a reassignment nobody recorded.

Run that comparison monthly. It is a join on serial number and it finds drift within weeks rather than at the annual audit.

Make the sanctioned route easy: a two-field form to record a transfer, rather than a return-to-IT-and-reissue process that nobody will follow.

Accessories and peripherals

Decide what you track. Monitors and docks are worth tracking; cables and mice generally are not.

Set a value threshold and apply it consistently.

Record accessories against the person, not the primary device, since they persist across laptop refreshes.

Untracked accessories accumulate into a meaningful figure and disappear at scale, which is an argument for tracking monitors specifically.

Remote and home devices

Record the location as the person's registered address, not the office.

Ask annually whether the device is still with them and still at that address.

Understand the return position before you need it: who pays for shipping, what packaging, what timeframe. Agreeing this at assignment is easier than at departure.

Devices at former addresses are the most common category of unrecovered asset.

Loans and temporary issues

A separate status, with an expected return date.

A report of overdue loans, reviewed. Loans become permanent silently.

Common cases: replacement during repair, temporary equipment for a project, devices for contractors.

Lost and stolen

A defined process: report, register status change, remote wipe, insurance claim if applicable, police report where required, replacement.

Record the circumstances, which matters for insurance and for spotting patterns.

Wipe first, and confirm it. The data is the exposure, not the hardware.

The monthly comparison

One report, run monthly, that keeps the register honest:

Assets in the register not seen by endpoint management in thirty days.

Devices in endpoint management not in the register.

Assignment mismatches between the two.

Assets assigned to people no longer in the directory.

Four lists, each short after the first run, each actionable. This is the entire ongoing maintenance of a hardware register and it takes an hour a month.

The self-service transfer form

Unrecorded reassignment is the main cause of register drift, and the fix is making the sanctioned route trivial.

Two fields: asset tag or serial, and the new holder.

No approval required for a like-for-like transfer within a team.

Confirmation to both parties, which is what makes people use it.

Automatic register update, and a prompt to the endpoint platform to update the primary user.

Reconcile monthly anyway, because some transfers will still go unrecorded.

A three-week approval process for moving a monitor between two desks guarantees the drift the register is trying to prevent.

Tracking monitors and docks

Peripherals fall below most tracking thresholds and account for a meaningful share of unrecovered value.

Monitors are worth tracking. High value, long life, easily forgotten at a former employee's home.

Docks are worth tracking for the same reasons.

Chargers, cables and mice are not. Track them and the register fills with noise.

Record peripherals against the person, not the laptop, since they persist across refreshes.

Include them on the return kit list, which is where most of the recovery happens.

Set the threshold by value and write it down, so the decision is consistent rather than made by whoever is doing the data entry.