Business Core · Business Assets · Module
Asset register
A current list of what the organisation holds, where it is, and who is responsible for it. Administrative-sounding and the foundation for everything else here.
The idea
How it works
A register that only exists for the auditors describes what accounting recognises, which is a small and unrepresentative subset of what the organisation actually depends on.
The useful version includes the things with no purchase price: the customer database, the trained model, the domain name, the accumulated documentation. These are frequently the most valuable and the least tracked.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Include intangibles from the start
A register built around physical assets is very hard to widen later, because the categories are already wrong.
- 02
Name an owner per asset
Not a department. Someone who would notice if it stopped working or went missing.
- 03
Record location, not just existence
An asset nobody can find is functionally absent, whatever the register says.
- 04
Review on a schedule
Registers decay quietly. An annual pass catches the disposals nobody recorded.
One level in
The components of asset register
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
Build the register around categories that include intangibles. Widening a physical-asset register later is harder than starting correctly.
The other modules in business assets
Intellectual property
What the organisation owns that is not physical — trademarks, patents, copyright, data — and the rights position around each.
LearnUtilisation
How much each asset is actually used against what it could be. The measure that turns an inventory into a management tool.
LearnLifecycle
Acquisition, maintenance, replacement and disposal, planned rather than triggered by failure. The unplanned version is always more expensive.
Learn