Nine asset tagging mistakes that ruin a register

Tagging before deciding what a tag is for

The first question is not which tag to buy. It is what the register has to be able to answer. A register built to satisfy an auditor needs cost, acquisition date and a traceable identifier. A register built to control equipment needs custodian, location and condition. A register built for insurance needs replacement value and location grouping.

Most organisations need all three, which is fine, but they need to know that before capture starts. Deciding afterwards means going back to every asset, and going back to every asset is the expensive part of this exercise, not the tag.

Buying one tag type for the whole estate

This is the single most common technical mistake. An organisation gets a per-tag price, likes it, and applies that specification everywhere: air-conditioned offices, plant rooms, kitchens, vehicles and outdoor equipment.

The office tags will be fine. The kitchen and plant room tags will lift within a year, and the outdoor ones will fade until they no longer scan. You then pay twice: once for the original tags, and again for the re-tagging exercise, which now also carries the cost of working out which asset each orphaned record belongs to.

Specify per environment. It is usually cheaper overall, because the majority of assets in a typical estate are indoors and can take a lighter specification, and only a minority need metal or acetone-activated tags.

Encoding meaning into the asset number

It is tempting to build the location, the department or the purchase year into the asset number. HO-FIN-2024-0031 looks informative.

The problem is that assets move and departments get restructured. Within two years that number is telling you something that is no longer true, and it is printed on a physical tag you cannot edit. Anyone reading the register then has to know which parts of the number to trust and which to ignore.

Keep the number short, unique and meaningless. Location, department and custodian are fields in the register, and fields can be updated. Tags cannot.

Loading an unverified spreadsheet and calling it a register

Bulk uploading an old spreadsheet is fast and it feels like progress. But if that spreadsheet has never been checked against reality, the upload has not created a register. It has created a very tidy list of claims.

Worse, it legitimises them. Once the data is in a system with a clean interface, people stop questioning it. The errors that were obvious in a messy spreadsheet become invisible in a neat one.

Load it if it is useful, but treat the first physical verification as the moment the register becomes real, and report the differences rather than quietly overwriting them.

Tagging assets nobody will ever verify

Tagging every stapler and every extension cable feels thorough. It is actually a way of making the annual verification so long that it stops happening.

Set a capitalisation threshold with your accountant and tag above it, plus a defined set of below-threshold items that are attractive to theft or matter operationally, such as laptops, phones, tools and small medical devices. A register of two thousand assets that gets verified every year is worth far more than a register of eleven thousand that gets verified once.

Fitting the tag where nobody can read it

A tag on the underside of a desk, behind a cabinet or on the back of a wall-mounted screen means the verifier has to move furniture. Multiply that by four hundred assets and you have added days to every future count.

Fit tags consistently, in a position that can be reached and read without moving anything, and record the convention so the next team follows it. Consistency matters more than the specific position you choose.

Letting two people number in parallel

Duplicate asset numbers almost always come from two teams working in different buildings from the same starting number. It is discovered months later, usually during an audit, and unpicking it means physically revisiting both assets.

Allocate number ranges before mobilising, one range per team or per site, and keep a central record of what has been issued.

Recording the purchase date as the tagging date

These are different fields for a reason. Purchase date drives depreciation. Date tagged records when the label went on. In a first-time tagging exercise every asset gets the same tagging date and wildly different purchase dates, and conflating them makes the depreciation schedule nonsense.

Treating handover as the end of the project

The register is accurate on the day it is delivered and starts decaying immediately unless somebody owns it. Additions have to be entered when they are bought, movements have to be recorded when they happen, and leavers have to hand back what they hold.

Name the owner, name the backup, and put asset handover on the staff exit checklist before the tagging team leaves site. This costs nothing and it is the difference between a register that lasts five years and one that lasts five months.

Common questions about asset tagging mistakes

If you recognise two or three of these asset tagging mistakes in your own register, none of them are fatal on their own. They compound, which is why the fix is usually a single verification round rather than nine separate corrections.

Continue with the right next guide