Nobody wants an asset register.
They want the laptop back, the invoice to be for things they actually own, and to not be the only person who knows what is where. The register is how those happen. It is not the point.
Three things below, and none of them are paperwork. If none of them are a problem you have, you do not need this — and the calculator will tell you so.
Somebody leaves on Friday
They had a laptop. Probably a dock. Possibly a second monitor that went home during a lockdown and never came back. Six weeks later somebody needs a spare and the trail is a Slack message from a manager who has also left.
The awkward part is not that people keep things. It is that nobody can say what to ask for, so the ask is vague, and a vague ask is easy to leave unanswered.
Simpletag knows what is assigned to each person, because the machines report who signs in to them rather than waiting for anyone to update a spreadsheet. On their last day you press one button and they get a list — every item, with a photograph of the actual one, because "the black dock" is every dock ever made.
They tick what they have sent. You confirm what turns up. Nothing is marked returned because an email went out — a claim and a receipt are different facts, and only one of them is yours to make.
You are paying for things you do not have
Equipment that left the building three years ago can still be sitting on four different bills. It gets insured. It gets depreciated, which quietly overstates what the company is worth. In 36 states it gets declared on a business personal property tax rendition and taxed, every year, until somebody notices. And then the expensive one: somebody buys a replacement for a machine that was in a drawer the whole time.
We are not going to quote you a percentage. The figures floating around — 15 to 30 per cent of a register is ghost assets — come from companies selling asset software, not from research, and repeating them would make everything else here worth less. You already know roughly how wrong your list is. That is the number that matters and it is the one the calculator asks you for.
What Simpletag does about it is unglamorous: it holds what the machines report and what your spreadsheet claims, and shows you every place the two disagree. That gap is the product. Everything else on this page is a consequence of closing it.
Right now, it is all in one person's head
Which machines are old. Who has the spare. What that unlabelled box in the comms cupboard does. Whether the laptop that went missing in March was encrypted. In most companies under a few hundred people, the answer to every one of those lives with one person — often somebody doing IT alongside another job entirely.
That is fine right up until it is not. They leave, or they are on holiday the week a customer sends a security questionnaire, or the insurer asks for a schedule and the honest answer is "give me a fortnight."
A register that fills itself in is the difference. Nothing here depends on anybody remembering — the agent reports, the diff shows what disagrees, and the answer is on a screen rather than in a head that might be on a beach.
The parts we cannot put a number on
These are real, and none of them are arithmetic — so they are deliberately left out of the calculator rather than folded in to make it look better.
"Was it encrypted?"
The question after a laptop goes missing. Simpletag records the answer from the machine itself, before it went. It is the difference between a bad afternoon and a notifiable one.
The bid you can answer
Contracts increasingly gate on a hardware inventory with make, model, serial and location. That is a line item on real supplier questionnaires, and the answer is either ready or it is not. More on that →
Replacing the right machines
Not the ones whose owners complain loudest. The ones the numbers say, with a reason you can put in front of whoever signs it off.
Proof the data was destroyed
When kit is retired you get a certificate of sanitisation with the method and who attested it — not a claim that software checked. More on that →
And if none of that is you
Then do not buy it. A company of twenty where nobody has left in two years is genuinely fine with a spreadsheet, and we would rather say so than take the money and be the thing you cancel in March.
Put your own numbers in — it is arithmetic, it runs in your browser, and it is perfectly willing to tell you no. Free covers 25 computers with no card, for as long as you like.