Asset events

Assets go through three stages: acquisition, or how you obtained the asset; lifecycle, the events that happen during the life of the asset; and decommission, how you stopped using it.

AssetCenter comes pre-populated with many events across all three stages. For acquisition, the app comes with Purchased, Financed, Leased, Rented, Gifted, Donated, Inherited and Awarded.

For lifecycle, the app comes with Accidental Damage, Broken, Maintenance, Repair and Vandalism.

For decommission, the app comes with Lost, Recycled, Retired, Sold and Stolen.

We also provide condition events, which live on this page too. Condition events capture a snapshot of the condition of the asset at a point in time. The pre-populated conditions are Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor and Broken.

All of the events in the system are fully customizable, and you can create your own.

What you set on an event#

Editing an event type gives you more than its name:

• Icon and colour — how the event appears on the timeline, so a repair is recognizable at a glance without reading it.
• Cost category — which bucket the money recorded against this event counts toward.
• Limit to categories — restrict the event to the asset categories it makes sense for, so an oil change is not offered on a laptop. Leave it blank for no limit.

Cost categories#

Every organization starts with two cost categories, Maintenance and Repairs, and each lifecycle event is tied to one of them.

This is what lets an asset separate its costs. On an asset's overview, the cost row totals the purchase price, the warranty cost and the event costs — and because each event carries a cost category, maintenance spending and repair spending total independently rather than arriving as one lump. An asset that has cost little to maintain but a great deal to repair is telling you something different from one where it is the other way round, and this is the setting that keeps the two apart.

If you create your own lifecycle events, assigning a sensible cost category is what keeps those totals meaningful.

Custom fields#

As with categories, asset events let you customize the fields on the event. Perhaps you need to track the odometer reading at the time of the event, or the version of software running on the device. Custom fields on events give you significant flexibility in creating events. The field types available on asset events are text box, number, date, checkbox, Yes / No / NA selector, phone number and large text box.