Categories & Assets

This guide covers how inventory is set up — categories, batches, and the individual assets themselves.

Purpose

Before anything can be requested or handed out, it has to exist in the system. This answers: "What equipment do we own, and what do we know about each piece of it?"

Asset Categories

A category groups similar assets together — "Laptops," "Company Phones," "ID Badges," whatever makes sense for the organization. Categories are the level a request is made against (an employee requests a laptop, not a specific serial number), and the level the dashboard's by-category chart is built from.

Unlike most records in the system, a category isn't locked to a single company — it can be shared across multiple companies in a multi-company setup, so the same category list doesn't need to be recreated per company.

Batches

A batch (labelled "Asset Batch" in the system) is an optional grouping for assets bought or issued together — for example, everything on one purchase order. It's a simple label with a description; it doesn't track quantity or cost on its own. Individual assets can optionally be linked to a batch.

Individual Assets

Every physical item is its own record — there's no "quantity" field anywhere in the module. Fifty identical laptops means fifty separate asset records, each with:

• A name and description.
• A unique tracking ID — required, and enforced unique across the system.
• Purchase date and cost — both required when an asset is added.
• Its category, and optionally a batch.
• A status: In Use, Available, or Not-Available. New assets start as Available.
• An optional current user field, separate from the formal allocation record — see Requests, Allocation & Returns.
• An optional expiry date, with a configurable number of days of advance notice.

Expiry Alerts

If an asset has an expiry date set, the system checks daily and sends a notification the configured number of days beforehand — to whoever is set as the asset's current user, or to a system administrator if no one is set. This is useful for anything with a real shelf life: licenses, warranties, subscriptions tied to hardware, and so on.

What Each User Sees

Action	Employee	HR Administrator
View categories and asset lists	—	✅
Add, edit, or delete categories	—	✅
Add, edit, or delete batches	—	✅
Add, edit, or delete individual assets	—	✅
Import assets in bulk / export the asset list	—	✅

Ordinary employees don't browse the inventory directly — their entry point is requesting an asset, covered in Requests, Allocation & Returns.

How Visibility Is Decided

1. Permissions. Every inventory action — viewing, adding, editing, deleting, importing, exporting — requires its own specific permission. There's no manager-hierarchy fallback here; inventory management is an administrative function.
2. Company. Assets and batches belong to the company they were added under; categories can be shared across companies (see above).

Customization Options

• Categories and batches are freely defined — as many or as few as the organization needs.
• Bulk import (from a spreadsheet) is available for onboarding a large existing inventory at once, matching or creating categories and batches by name automatically.
• Expiry tracking is opt-in per asset.

Good to Know

• Deleting an asset is blocked if it's currently in use, or if it has ever appeared in an allocation record — even a returned one. The history is protected rather than lost.
• The "current user" field on an asset isn't the same as an active allocation. It's a separate, manually-set reference (used mainly for expiry notifications) rather than something the system updates automatically when an asset is allocated or returned — the authoritative record of who actually holds an asset right now is the allocation history in Requests, Allocation & Returns.

Every item, its own record.