Requests, Allocation & Returns

This guide covers how an asset actually gets into someone's hands — requesting, approving, direct allocation, returns, and the history that's kept along the way.

Purpose

Once inventory exists, the day-to-day question is: "How does an employee get equipment, and how does the system know who has what?"

Requesting an Asset

Any employee can request an asset for themselves — no special permission needed. A request is made against a category (for example, "Laptop"), not a specific unit; the exact asset is chosen later when the request is approved. Someone with the right administrative permission can also file a request on another employee's behalf, for cases where HR is arranging equipment ahead of time.

Approving or Rejecting a Request

An administrator reviews pending requests, and for an approval, picks a specific available asset from the requested category to hand over. Approving:

• Marks that specific asset In Use.
• Creates the allocation record linking the asset to the employee.
• Notifies the employee.

The handover's condition can be documented with photos at this point. Rejecting a request simply notifies the employee and closes it out — no asset changes hands.

Direct Allocation (Without a Request)

An administrator can also skip the request step entirely and hand a specific available asset straight to an employee — useful for standard issue equipment (a laptop on day one, for example) rather than waiting for the employee to ask. Condition photos are required for this path, documenting the asset's state at handover.

Returning an Asset

Returning is a two-step handoff:

1. The employee flags it for return. A quick action from their side signals that an asset is coming back.
2. An administrator processes the actual return, recording the return date, a written condition note, a condition rating — Healthy, Minor Damage, or Major Damage — and optional photos.

What happens next depends on the condition recorded:

• Healthy → the asset goes back to Available, ready to be requested or allocated again.
• Minor or Major Damage → the asset is set to Not-Available and comes out of the pool. There's no separate "damaged" status — Not-Available is the same status used for anything else pulled out of circulation; the damage detail itself lives in the return record.

Reporting an Issue

Separately from returning an asset, whoever currently holds it — or anyone with edit rights — can file a free-text report describing a problem, with attachments if needed. This doesn't change the asset's status or trigger a return; it's simply a way to flag something without giving the asset back.

Asset History

Every allocation — and its eventual return, if any — is kept as a permanent record, searchable and groupable by asset or by employee. This is the definitive answer to "who has had this asset, and when."

What Each User Sees

Action	Employee	Reporting Manager	HR Administrator
Request an asset for themselves	✅	✅	✅
Request on someone else's behalf	—	—	✅
View their own / their team's requests	✅ (own)	✅ (own + team)	✅ (everyone's)
Approve or reject a request	—	—	✅
Allocate directly	—	—	✅
Flag their own asset for return	✅	✅	✅
Process a return	—	—	✅
Report an issue on an asset they hold	✅	✅	✅
View asset history	—	—	✅

How Visibility Is Decided

1. Ownership. Requesting, viewing, returning, and reporting issues on one's own assets requires no special permission — every employee can do this for themselves.
2. Permissions. Approving, rejecting, allocating directly, processing returns, and viewing history all require the matching administrative permission.
3. The reporting line. The combined requests-and-allocations list falls back to a manager's own records plus their subordinates' when the broader "view all" permission isn't held — the same manager-hierarchy visibility pattern used across the system. This affects what a manager can see, not what they can approve.
4. Company. Requests and allocations are scoped to the company they belong to.

Good to Know

• A request names a category, not a unit. Which physical asset actually gets handed over is always decided at approval time, based on what's available.
• Approving a request and allocating directly use the same underlying action — the only difference is whether there was a request to approve first, or HR is skipping straight to handing something out.
• Condition photos are optional at handover but recommended at both ends of an allocation — they're the clearest record if a dispute ever comes up about an asset's condition.

Ask, receive, return — all on file.