Chain of custody
Chain of custody is an unbroken record of who held a specific item, and when, from the moment it was acquired to the moment it left the organisation.
Chain of custody is an unbroken record of who held a specific item, and when, from the moment it was acquired to the moment it left the organisation.
← Equipment management glossary
Also called: custody trail, custody record.
A custody record with gaps does not prove less than a complete one — in disputes it often proves nothing at all, because any gap is where the other party places the event. This is why partial tracking of high-value equipment tends to disappoint: the effort is spent, the protection is not obtained.
The practical consequence is that a custody trail has to be produced by the workflow itself rather than by people remembering to document. Anything that depends on discipline will have gaps.
For most equipment, custody records are simply good management. In several contexts they are a requirement: regulated medical devices, calibrated test and measurement equipment, controlled substances, evidence handling, and equipment whose maintenance history has to be demonstrable to an auditor or insurer.
In those settings the record's value is evidentiary, which raises the bar. Timestamps that cannot be edited after the fact, and a log that shows amendments rather than silently overwriting, matter more than in ordinary use.
Rarely fraud. Usually four mundane things: informal handovers between colleagues that nobody logs, equipment moved during out-of-hours work, items that go from one job straight to the next without returning to store, and records edited later to "tidy up" — which destroys the very property that made them useful.
A custody trail with gaps offers little protection in a dispute, because the gap is exactly where the other party will place the loss or the damage.
Every Itefy checkout, check-in, location change and condition change is timestamped against the item and kept in its history rather than overwriting the previous state. Read more.
It is a requirement in regulated settings and useful everywhere else. Any organisation that has argued about who damaged something, or lost equipment nobody was accountable for, has had a chain-of-custody problem without naming it.
Yes, and they are the most common cause. If A checks out an item and hands it to B unrecorded, the record says A has it — which is wrong in exactly the situation where you need it to be right.
An equipment loan agreement is a short written record of who borrowed which equipment, when it is due back, and what condition it was in when it left.
DefinitionAn equipment condition report is a dated record of the physical and working state of a specific item, used to track deterioration and settle damage questions.
DefinitionAn inventory audit is a physical check of what an organisation actually holds against what its records claim, followed by reconciliation of the differences.
DefinitionAn equipment sign-out sheet is a log where people record which equipment they are taking, when they took it and when they returned it.
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