What is asset management?

Businesses of all shapes and sizes purchase, replace and acquire new assets every day. 

As there is such a regular flow of assets entering and leaving the business, the pressure is constantly rising for professionals to ensure accurate and correct records. 

However, whilst asset management represents a crucial business task, uncertainty and confusion as to how to efficiently execute it still prevail. This has become even more of an issue of late, as this year’s Covid-19 pandemic has led to an explosion in home and remote working practices. Now more than ever, businesses are facing the very real challenge of tracking and managing physical and intangible assets across multiple locations.  

It now simply isn’t practical, or in some cases even legal, to travel between sites or locations to keep a cohesive and up to date log of hardware and software requirements and issues, IT problems and health and safety concerns.  

Utilising an effective asset management system, helping you to improve on compliance and efficiency during such a challenging time, is the key to successfully protecting your business’s assets.  

To guide and support you in this process, we’ve put together this blog, covering the basics at the heart of asset management, and its increasing importance during the current Covid-19 pandemic. 

What are assets? 

“An asset is something a business uses to create income, meet debts, grow wealth and certainly to attract and retain customers.” – Carlton Sharpe-Buckley, Product Specialist, IRIS 

Assets can be a variety of physical items that depreciate over time, as well as more ‘intangible’ business items that you may not have previously considered. These can include: 

• Land 
• Building 
• Furnishings 
• Large IT purchases 
• Hardware  
• Software  
• Policies  
• Contracts 
• Lease agreements  
• Business vehicles  

From our experience, physical assets are typically valued over £1000, but this is by no means a fixed sum, and is usually determined by individual organisations.  

What is asset management? 

 “Asset management can be a strategic differentiator for companies that seek to actively balance investment, revenue to expense, and return.” – Shannon Kalvar, Research Manager, IT Service Management and Client Virtualization, IDC 

Asset management is a fundamental way for organisations of any size to accurately record their assets, and to track the value of those assets. 

The best practice is for businesses to record all their assets into a database, continuously assessing purchases, movement, deterioration and general usage. 

Inaccurately reporting information on fixed assets can have a severe impact on your business, increasing the cost and resources required to efficiently run your organisation. 

The beginner’s guide to asset management 

Are you looking for more information regarding asset management? 

We’ve created a beginner’s guide, taking an in-depth look into: 

• The fundamental processes required 
• Why you need asset management 
• The top benefits and challenges 
• What solutions are available 

Click here to download the guide, and discover how you can save valuable time and business resources, whilst simultaneously guaranteeing compliance. 

How can IRIS help? 

Our solution, IRIS Assets, supports a vast range of organisations with their asset management responsibility, offering a modern alternative to traditional spreadsheets and paper processes. 

IRIS Assets is the complete asset management and compliance software package, featuring a fully integrated mobile app. 

It provides true visibility of all your assets and acts as a powerful tool for control, analysis and forward planning. By centralising your asset management, IRIS Assets can provide you with an in-depth overview of assets across all sites and remote locations, and allows you to compile all associated data into easy to access, centralised reports.  

You can remotely sync your asset data in real time across all locations, and safely upload and manage all intangible assets such as documents, contracts and company policies. Intangible, paper-based assets are often harder to quantify, catalogue and manager, especially in the current age of remote working. 

The system can even be set to provide you with automated reminders to review and assess your business contracts and service agreements, potentially saving you precious time and money.  

For more information on how IRIS Assets can revolutionise your processes, click here.