Spreadsheets Are Not Good Enough For Asset Management

We’ve all used them, spreadsheets, whether it’s to do a simple list of items, or whether you are looking to create advanced sums for business forecasts. Although they are not really good enough for our uses, we still manage to put up with them. No doubt the reason for this is because we would rather use a free package that came with our PC, instead of buying a new one that’s more suitable for the job.

Although spreadsheets have their downsides, they do have advantages and are useful for a number of uses. The main advantages are that they can manage simple math calculations, create visual graphs and finally create easy to manage business forecasts. They all prove to be useful at some point in time. However, due to the number of problems they are, they simply aren’t good enough for tracking your UK fixed assets.

Despite it sounding like a very good tool for storing asset data, it’s just not as complex as an asset tracking software UK package.

To a certain extent, a spreadsheet is useful for asset management, however, as you increase the amount of assets your company has and the amount of data you want to store, they become useless.

Here are some handy features that you should look out for in your asset management software.

  • It should be able to hold enough data and in enough detail as you need it to. Even though the amount of data a spreadsheet can store is enough for some tasks, in asset management it tends not to be. The data that has been stored may also not be in enough depth for it’s use.
  • It must be able to reflect the structure of the company, no matter how complex. If the asset sites in a number of sectors within the company, a spreadsheet cannot reflect this type of structure.
  • They should be able to be restructured quite easily. Once you start creating a more advanced spreadsheet, it then becomes tough to add new data and alter the structure.
  • It should be able to calculate a number of depreciation rates on several items. If a number of assets were linked together, however they had been bought at different times, such as a computer, keyboard and mouse. The software should be capable enough to store individual price depreciation levels.
  • It should be able to cope with re-lifeing of assets. If you are re-assessing assets and find that an item has now become useful, you should be able to alter the depreciation levels for that item.
  • Must be able to create structured reports. Spreadsheets make it difficult to create useful, structured data reports.

Those were just a few of the points that a specifically designed asset management software package must include. Plus it’s why a standard spreadsheet package is not suitable for storing company asset data and adding the data to a fixed asset register.

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