As your business grows, the complexity involved in managing fixed assets increases too. If you attempt to manage physical assets manually, it would take up too much of your resources – time, human resource and money. Small business owners and their teams have their hands full with day-to-day business activities. Therefore, it makes sense to have other non-core activities outsourced or automated, based on what the requirement is.

What is fixed asset management all about?

Every business is different and depending on the nature of your business and industry, you could be dealing with a few hundred or thousands of fixed assets. Fixed assets come in all shapes and sizes – tables and chairs, laptops and workstations, AV equipment and so on. These could form a significant part of your capital expenditure, hence the need to efficiently manage and track these physical assets.

Fixed asset management involves overseeing the complete life cycle of the asset from the time it is acquired to the time it is disposed of. This also involves implementing a fixed asset accounting software tailored to meet your business needs.

Before you can implement a fixed asset software, you will need a comprehensive inventory of all your company’s physical assets. This would involve counting and assigning bar code tags to the assets to help in systematic tracking. Then the number of physical assets will be checked and reconciled with the information in the management system.

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Why should you invest in fixed asset management?

Small businesses may sometimes be skeptical about making the switch to an automated system of managing physical assets, but the long term cost-savings that such a system brings, makes it worth investing in. These are some of the benefits systematic fixed asset management can bring to your business:

  • Helps multiple teams track assets electronically
  • Eliminates disorganization and helps avoid cases of lost or stolen assets
  • Helps to free up valuable resources from a non-core activity
  • Reduces instances of human error and oversight
  • Provides a complete audit trail and improves compliance
  • Aids in systematically tracking depreciation and accurate accounting

A number of companies offer such services in the Middle East. InfoFort, for instance provides holistic fixed asset management solutions to businesses including an assessment of your business requirements, designing an appropriate system to address those specific requirements, counting and classifying the assets and bar code tagging, and implementation of the asset management software.