Why You Need to Implement an Asset Barcoding Solution

Tracking company assets is vital to the success of your business. Implementing an asset barcoding solution can help your company keep track of everything related to assets and inventory without spending hours on it each week.

Here at Asset Panda, we talk a lot about asset and inventory tracking. But what is the difference between the two, and how can using barcodes in each one be beneficial?

Asset vs. Inventory

An asset is defined as items of ownership that can often be written off or listed as an expense in a company's balance sheet. All assets can be defined as tangible or non-tangible. Physical and fixed assets, like inventory or equipment, would be considered a tangible asset. Non-tangible assets would include things like copyrights, intellectual property, or trademarks.

Inventory is defined as goods, materials, and products currently in possession intended for resale. Inventory turnover is directly related to business revenue and shareholder earnings. Many financial institutions consider inventory a crucial asset for any company.

While the two terms are related, they are not interchangeable. Inventory can be an asset, but not all assets are considered inventory. Being able to tell the two apart will help your company efficiency and, in turn, bring you more ROI for the effort you put into keeping the system organized.

Benefits of Using an Asset Barcoding Solution

Using an asset barcoding solution comes with a number of benefits that would be foolish not to implement. Here are some of the more prominent benefits you'll receive when using barcodes to track your assets.

Improves Productivity

Barcodes make it easy to collect and record data in a matter of seconds. Instead of needing to manually enter information with each change, you can scan a barcode to pull up asset records and make changes from your smartphone. No one likes spending hours on inventory, and barcodes reduce the time required to keep it maintained.

Increase Accuracy

No one means to make mistakes, but that doesn't prevent them from happening. The less opportunity you and your team have to manually change the system, the more you can eliminate errors in your asset database. Scanning a code is one of the most accurate ways to pull up asset records. There's no opportunity for your employees to enter information wrong, which means they'll find what they need every time.

Keep Industry Compliance

Your industry has a number of rules and regulations that you have to keep in order to continue operating. However, trying to manually track asset compliance can get you in big trouble. Instead of relying on your memory to track industry regulations, store that information in each asset barcode. That way, you'll be sure to see it and enforce it every time you or your employees interact with company assets.

Enforce Accountability

Barcode systems also require your team to be more accountable. Scanning a code makes it incredibly difficult to change asset records. This means your team will have to pay more attention to what they are doing. If they do something wrong, it's more likely to show up on the system than it would in a manual management environment.

Asset barcoding solutions don't have to take a lot out of your team. Once you have the system set up, you can track your inventory, equipment, and other important company assets and get back to client-facing work.