Home location
An item's home location is where it belongs when idle; its current location is where it is right now. The two are separate fields for a reason.
An item's home location is where it belongs when idle; its current location is where it is right now. The two are separate fields for a reason.
← Equipment management glossary
Also called: default location, home location vs current location.
"Where does this live?" and "where is it now?" are different questions with different answers most of the time, and collapsing them into one field means losing one of the answers.
Home location is a policy statement: this is the shelf it should be returned to. It changes rarely, and it is what tells someone holding equipment where to put it back. Current location is a fact that changes constantly as equipment moves.
Comparing the two gives you something neither provides alone: a list of equipment that is not where it belongs. Most of that list is legitimate — items in use, out on loan, at a job site. The remainder is the interesting part, because equipment that is away from home with no checkout explaining why is exactly what goes missing.
This is also the cheapest possible audit. You do not have to count anything to produce a list of items whose location nobody can account for.
Locations that are too coarse ("Head Office") tell nobody anything. Locations so fine that they need constant updating ("Shelf 3, bay 2, third from left") stop being maintained within a month.
The workable level is usually the smallest space a person would walk to: a room, a store, a vehicle, a site. Nested locations help — a room inside a building inside a site — because they let people record at whatever precision they actually know.
With only one location field, you can know where something is or where it should be, but never that the two disagree — which is the signal that equipment is drifting.
Itefy holds home and current location per item, both settable at import, with nested locations and a location changelog per item. Read more.
If equipment moves, yes. One field forces a choice between knowing where things belong and knowing where they are, and the difference between those two is what tells you something has gone astray.
The smallest space someone would walk to — a room, a store, a vehicle. Shelf-level detail sounds better and stops being maintained almost immediately.
An equipment inventory is a complete, current list of the equipment an organisation owns, with enough detail per item to identify it, locate it and account for it.
DefinitionAn inventory audit is a physical check of what an organisation actually holds against what its records claim, followed by reconciliation of the differences.
DefinitionChain 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.
DefinitionEquipment checkout is the recorded handover of an item to a person for a period of time, closed by a check-in when the item comes back.
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