Hardware overview

The hardware register is the single source of truth for every physical device your organization owns — laptops, phones, monitors, peripherals, and anything else worth tracking. It answers what an IT team gets asked constantly: what do we own, where is it, who has it, what did it cost, and is it still under warranty. This page explains the model behind the register; the how-to guides linked throughout cover the steps.

You reach it at Assets → Hardware in the admin console. It opens on a filterable, sortable list with status chips and a search box that matches almost any field on a record.

What an asset is

Each row is one physical unit. A box of ten identical laptops is ten assets, not one — each unit has its own serial number, assignee, and place in the lifecycle. Modelling each unit separately is what lets you answer "who has this laptop" rather than only "how many laptops do we have".

Every asset carries a few defining attributes:

Attribute	Required	Default	Notes
Asset name	Yes	—	Human label, e.g. MacBook Pro 16" M3 Max.
Asset tag	No	Auto-generated	The sticker identifier (e.g. OT-000001). Unique per workspace; leave blank on create to auto-generate.
Serial number	No	—	Manufacturer's identifier. Unique, and the value the agent matches a real machine to its record on.
Category	No	—	The kind of device. Groups the list, drives the row icon and colour, and decides which specification fields appear on the form. Managed under Library.
Status	Yes	available	Where the asset is in its lifecycle. See the lifecycle.
Condition	Yes	new	Physical state, independent of status. See condition.
Assignee	—	—	The person the asset is currently issued to, set only by the Assign action.

:::tip Status is not condition Status is about custody and lifecycle stage; condition is about physical wear. An asset can be available and fair at once — back in the cupboard and ready to reissue, but scuffed. Keeping them separate means a status filter never gets muddied by how battered the hardware is. :::

The asset lifecycle

Most assets travel the same path: they arrive, go to someone, come back, and eventually leave. The register models that path with a set of statuses. The key rule: status reflects reality rather than driving it — you change an asset's situation through an action, and the status follows.

The happy path:

1. In stock. A newly added asset starts unassigned — available (ready to issue), in_storage (put away), or reserved (held for an upcoming need).
2. Assigned. Issuing the asset to an employee sets assigned and creates a custody record linking the device to that person.
3. Recovered. When it comes back, you recover it: the custody record closes, you record the returned condition, and you choose where it goes next.
4. Retired, then disposed. At end of life it becomes retired (off the active roster but still on the books) and then disposed (gone — sold, recycled, or destroyed). These keep the historical record intact for audit and depreciation without cluttering the active inventory.

Statuses

Status	Meaning	Set by
available	In stock, ready to issue.	Form, recover, bulk action
assigned	Issued to a person right now.	Assign action only
reserved	Held for a specific upcoming need.	Form, bulk action
in_storage	Put away, not in active rotation.	Form, recover, bulk action
in_repair	Temporarily out of action.	Form, recover, bulk action
retired	Out of service, still on the books.	Form, recover, bulk action
disposed	Gone — sold, recycled, or destroyed.	Form, recover, bulk action
lost	Missing, whereabouts unknown.	Form only
stolen	Missing, confirmed taken.	Form only

in_repair, lost, and stolen sit outside the happy path — they exist so the register can tell the truth about a device that isn't where it should be.

:::warning "Assigned" is special — you cannot set it by editing a record Assignment only happens through the dedicated Assign action, because issuing a device creates the custody record, captures who assigned it and when, and notifies the employee. Choosing "assigned" on the create or edit form is quietly corrected back to available, so you never end up with assets marked as issued but no record of who has them. The same protection applies on the way out: you cannot delete an assigned asset, and bulk status changes skip any assigned row. Recover the asset first, then change or delete it. :::

note

Deleting an asset moves it to trash (a soft delete) rather than erasing it. The history stays recoverable, which matters when the record is part of a compliance trail.

Condition

Condition is a fixed, deliberately coarse scale. A short shared vocabulary keeps condition comparable across hundreds of assets and dozens of people entering it; a free-text "describe the wear" field would not.

Condition	Use for
new	Unopened or never used.
excellent	As-new, no visible wear.
good	Light, expected wear.
fair	Noticeable wear, fully functional.
poor	Heavy wear, still usable.
broken	Not functional.

The condition you record at recovery becomes the asset's current condition, so the next person to look at the device sees an honest, up-to-date state rather than how it shipped years ago.

How status and condition drive the views

• Status chips at the top of the register are live filters with counts — jump to "everything in repair" or "everything assigned" in one click.
• Warranty filters appear automatically when assets near or pass their warranty expiry, but they deliberately ignore retired and disposed assets — chasing the warranty on a device you no longer use is noise.

How hardware connects to the rest of the platform

An asset record is the hub that ties together several other parts of the platform.

People

Assigning an asset links it to a user, two-directionally: the asset shows who holds it, and the person's profile shows what they hold. This is what makes offboarding tractable — when someone leaves, you can see every device to recover before their last day. The assignment history on each asset preserves every past holder, not just the current one.

Software

A hardware asset is where software lives, so the register connects to your software records. License assignments and agent-detected installed applications attach to the device, which lets you ask questions spanning both worlds: which paid licenses are tied to a laptop about to be retired, or what's actually installed on a given machine.

Finance

Each asset carries its financial profile — purchase price, purchase date, depreciation rate, and current value — and can roll up to a cost center so spend is attributed to the right team. Assets without a cost center still work; they land in an "Unassigned" bucket on finance reports. This is also where BYOD (bring-your-own-device) assets are handled: flag one and it's excluded from depreciation and instead carries a recurring monthly stipend. Keeping finance attributes on the asset means hardware and cost reporting draw from the same records, so they never disagree.

The agent

The endpoint agent runs on employee machines and reports each device's hardware specs and installed software back to the platform. From the Agent fleet, you link a reporting device to a hardware record, and the platform matches on serial number — reusing the existing record if one already carries that serial, or creating a new one if not, and refreshing specs like CPU, RAM, and storage from what the machine actually reports. The link is a deliberate admin action, because the agent can't tell whether a laptop is a personal device, a loaner, or already in the register under a different serial. Because the employee proved possession by pairing the agent from their own laptop, that link also stands in for the manual "I received this" acknowledgement.

The result is two complementary sources of truth that reconcile against each other: records you enter by hand (the register) and records the agent observes (the live fleet). Where they overlap, the serial number is the join.

note

The agent reports only on devices it's installed on. Plenty of assets — monitors, docks, phones without the agent — exist in the register solely because you added them. The register is the complete picture; the agent enriches the part of it that runs software.

Limitations and trade-offs

Boundary	What it means
One asset, one current holder	An asset can be assigned to a single person at a time. For genuinely shared kit — loaner laptops, AV gear — use shared assets (the pool) rather than constantly reassigning a single record.
Status tracks custody, not live location	A location is tracked separately from status, but this isn't a real-time tracking system. It records where you put a device, not where it physically is right now.
The agent can't see everything	Specs are only as current as the last device that reported in, and only for assets running the agent. Everything else is exactly as accurate as what people enter — which is why the import, assignment, and recovery flows are built to make honest data the easy path.

Related

Add a hardware assetCreate a single asset and fill in its details.Read →Assign and recover hardwareHand a device to a person and take it back.Read →Bulk actions and importWork on many assets at once.Read →Track your first hardware assetStart from zero with a guided walkthrough.Read →