The register has a physical half.
A row in a database cannot be picked up, handed over, or found in a cupboard. A tag can. Simpletag prints them, tracks what is behind them, and gives the scan somewhere useful to land — which is the part that tends to be missing.
The tag beside this is real, at real size, from the same code that prints yours. Scan it with a phone.
What is on it, and what deliberately is not.
A tag is visible to anybody who is near the machine, including whoever finds it in the back of a taxi. That decides what may be printed on it.
The QR code, a six-character tag code you can read down a phone, and your company name. Optionally one line of your own — a room, a cost centre, an internal number.
With some vendors a serial alone is enough to open a warranty claim in your name. It is in the register, where it belongs, and not on the outside of the laptop.
Because the code gets read aloud down a phone and typed in by somebody who is not looking at it. The letters that get confused are simply not in the alphabet.
Where the scan lands.
Signed in, it opens the machine. Not signed in — a stranger holding a laptop they found — it says who it belongs to and how to return it, and nothing else at all.
No serial. No user. No software list. No location. A tag on the outside of a machine must not be a key to the inventory of the company that owns it, and a page that leaks one is worse than no tag at all.
Your logo and your own line of text, so it reads as your company rather than as a vendor.
This equipment belongs to Acme Supply.
Nothing else about this machine is shown here.
Three things stop working without it.
The tag is not a label-printing feature bolted on the side. Three parts of the product identify equipment by it.
Getting kit back
A return list identifies each item by its tag, so somebody who no longer works for you matches a sticker instead of hunting for a serial on the underside of a dock.
“I still have it”
An employee scans the tag, taps once, and the register records a confirmation with their name against it. That is what clears the finding that says nobody has checked in a year.
The disposal certificate
The tag code runs through the whole record — invoice, condition, sanitisation, who attested — so the chain from purchase to destruction has one identifier the whole way.
Printed on what you already have.
Avery sheets for a laser printer, rolls for a Brother, Dymo or Zebra, and an SVG for a laser engraver when a sticker will not survive where the thing lives.
The engraving file uses real millimetres and filled geometry, so it imports at 1:1 and cuts what you see. It also refuses quietly to lie: below about 0.4 mm a module is smaller than the beam plus the heat it puts into the material, and the code stops scanning however good it looks on screen — so the file says so, in a comment, where whoever opens it will read it.
One honest caveat.
Tags printed before August 2026 carry the serial number. New ones do not. If the reason you like this page is the sentence about keeping serials off the outside of a machine, the tags already on your equipment do not honour it yet — reprint the ones that matter.
The public tag page never showed a serial, so nothing was ever exposed by a scan. It was only ever printed on the sticker.
Print the first sheet in about a minute.
Tag codes are issued when you ask for them, so nothing is wasted on machines you have not labelled. Free covers 25 computers, and monitors, printers and network gear never count.