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How Asset Management Can Benefit Your School This Year


Group of children at coding class. Children and their teacher sitting by the desk and using laptops. Teacher talking to kids. October is here and with it hallways echoing with the sounds of students, lectures, and the day-to-day of school life. Class bells will ring for each period, instructors will prime the budding minds of tomorrow, keyboards will clack as research turns to term papers. Except you somehow wound up a few systems short. How did that happen? Who checked that particular device out last? What? You can’t find those records? How does a ₤1,400 iMac go missing without notice? [Tweet "Who checked that particular device out last?"] It can happen easier than one might believe, especially if you fall into the 55 per cent that track assets by: An old-fashioned pen-and-paper method, a slightly more modern spreadsheet, or don’t bother to track them at all. By the time you realize the oversight, it may be too late to recover your property. You’ll be out the fund used to purchase it and its replacement, not to mention the dark marks against your reputations (yours personally, professionally, and that of your institution). How much time did you and your staff spend on the hunt for this errant piece of equipment? Tack that onto your expenses, as well as the time spent on catch-up for the tasks neglected for your pursuits! The costs keep on an upward move, don’t they?
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Asset management software, such as Wasp’s AssetCloud, can help ease the burden of not only locating your wayward equipment but also identify the last known responsible party for it. You can log maintenance records to keep your investments in their prime for as long as possible. Of course you can apply this tracking to electronics, but think of the other possibilities: Sports equipment; textbooks; laboratory utensils; films and videos (if you happen to keep physical copies on hand). Group of children at coding class. They are sitting by the desk and using laptops. Their female teacher standing beside desk, holding digital tablet and asking question and children raising hands to answer. Just as you can log your maintenance routines, you can also track equipment’s degradation and project a time line for its eventual replacement. While you can only plan so much for accidents and obsolescence, how much easier would it be to budget your annual equipment allotment with a more-than general outlook of its status and life expectancy? call-to-action-810x75-c Speaking of financial matters, here’s an often overlooked yet critical asset to track: Money. Grants from the Education and Skills Funding Agency, donations from private citizens, fundraiser monies, premiums, and teacher training funds, can all be logged, updated, and their uses tracked through AssetCloud. Especially in the case of government grants, this may well be mandatory for review purposes. Think of the Harrogate scandal: A school catering manager who spent eight years pilfering from student meal funds. Her grand sum came to just under ₤100,000; her thefts remained unnoticed until she became complacent and sloppy. With AssetCloud, overseers could set alerts that might have noticed these odd transactions much earlier. While none of us want to think of a trusted employee turning to thievery, precautions to better serve the students should never be ruled out. How could Wasp’s AssetCloud software benefit your school? What improvements could you see made?