← Equipment management glossary
Also called: fixed asset register, asset registry.
Finance kept a register. The workshop kept a spreadsheet. They disagreed on eighteen items, and settling which one was right took longer than the audit it was for.
One register, two audiences. Maintaining two lists is more work than maintaining one — and the operational copy is always the more current, because it is the one people actually use.
Two audiences, one list
Enough to satisfy an auditor
Acquisition date, cost, depreciation method, book value, disposal date.
Enough to find it and keep it working
Location, custodian, condition, service history.
The capitalisation threshold
Accounting rules generally require items above a certain value to be capitalised and depreciated rather than expensed, and that threshold is what determines whether something legally belongs in the fixed asset register. It varies by jurisdiction and by organisation.
The operational threshold is usually lower. A £200 drill may be too cheap to capitalise but is absolutely worth tracking, because it walks. Tracking below the accounting threshold is a choice you make on loss risk, not on accounting rules.
What makes a register trustworthy
Three properties. It is complete — additions are recorded at acquisition rather than eventually. It is current — disposals are recorded, which is where most registers rot. And it is reconciled — checked against physical reality on a schedule, so its claims have been tested.
A register missing any one of those is still useful for insurance and audit, but nobody in the organisation will trust it for day-to-day decisions, which wastes most of what it cost to build.
What goes wrong without it
A register that is never reconciled drifts until it lists equipment scrapped years ago and misses everything bought since — so insurance cover, depreciation and replacement budgets are all calculated from numbers nobody has verified.
How Itefy handles it
Itefy holds the operational and financial fields on the same item record — location, custodian and condition alongside purchase date, purchase value and expected salvage value. Read more.