You hand a new hire a laptop, a phone, maybe a monitor and a headset. Six months later someone asks where the spare laptop went, and nobody knows. Multiply that across every person you have onboarded and every person who has left, and the gear quietly disappears.
This is more common than it looks. A 2022 Capterra survey found that 71% of HR professionals had at least one departing employee who never returned company equipment like a laptop or a phone, with close to $2,000 of equipment walking out per person. Remote and hybrid staff were 17% more likely to keep the gear than on-site staff. A separate Oomnitza survey found that about half of companies lost at least 5% of their issued assets during offboarding.
So this guide is about how to keep track of the equipment you give employees: what to record, how to set it up fast, how to keep it current, and how to get the gear back when someone leaves. It is about tracking the equipment, not monitoring the person.
Track the gear, not the person
This is about knowing what you own and who holds it, not watching what people do on their devices. HomyScan tracks the equipment, not activity.
What to record for each item
You do not need a complex system. You need one record per item with enough detail to find it, value it and recover it. For every piece of equipment, capture:
- A unique asset ID and the item name.
- Serial number and, where useful, a photo.
- Who it is assigned to, and where it lives.
- The date you issued it and its condition.
- Purchase value, so you can see what is at risk.
- Status: in stock, assigned, in repair, returned.
That covers the gear most teams hand out: laptops, desktops, monitors, phones, tablets, headsets, docking stations, software licences and access badges. The same record works whether the item sits on a desk, in a van or in someone's home office.
Set up your equipment list in one afternoon
Two ways to build the list, and you can mix them.
Import what you already have. If your gear is in a spreadsheet, import the file and each row becomes an item. You keep the list you built and skip the retyping. Most teams that start this way are running the same day, and about 22% of HomyScan teams bring their first items in from a file.
Add by scanning. For anything not on a list, scan the barcode with your phone to create the record, then tag the item with a printed QR or barcode label. From then on, one scan pulls up who has it, where it is and its full history.
A clean asset register at the start is what makes everything after it easy.
Assign equipment to people and keep it current
The point of all this is one question answered in seconds: who has what. Assign each item to a person when you issue it, and check it back in when it comes back. Your team works from one live record they share, so the count on screen matches the gear in the room.
This is where manual tracking falls down. A shared spreadsheet drifts the moment two people edit it, and manual entry carries roughly a 3% error rate, which is three wrong records in every hundred. A scan updates the record itself, so the list stays true without anyone policing it.
Get the gear back when someone leaves
This is the part most guides skip, and it is where the money leaks. The fix starts before anyone leaves.
At onboarding, have the employee acknowledge what they received. A short signed list of items sets the expectation that the gear comes back. Then, when someone gives notice, you already know exactly what is assigned to them, so the return list writes itself.
On the last day, go through the list item by item and set a clear return deadline. For remote staff, make returning easy with a prepaid label or a pickup, and send a reminder if an item is still out. The reason this works is simple: you cannot recover what you never recorded. A current register turns offboarding from a guessing game into a checklist.
Run a quick audit now and then
Once or twice a year, walk the shelves and the desks and scan what you find against the record. Anything in the system but not in the room is a ghost asset, gear you are paying for and insuring but no longer have. A scan-based count takes a fraction of the time of a manual one, and it keeps your numbers honest for budgeting and for insurance.
Spreadsheet or app: when to switch
A spreadsheet is a fine start when you have a handful of items and one person updating it. It breaks when more than one person edits it, when you pass a hundred items, or when you need photos, locations and a history per item. At that point the manual work to keep it accurate costs more than the tool that replaces it.
If you track laptops, phones and licences across a team, IT asset tracking built for small teams gives you the record, the scanning and the who-has-what in one place, without an ERP or a setup project.
A system you can start today
Keeping track of the equipment you give employees comes down to four habits: record each item, assign it to a person, keep the record current with a scan, and recover it on the way out. Do those four and the gear stops disappearing, audits stop hurting, and you always know who has what.
You can set this up in an afternoon and try it free for 15 days, no card.