Spreadsheets Are Not Good Enough For Asset Management
We’ve all used them, spreadsheets, whether it’s to do a simple list of items, or whether you are looking to create advanced sums for business forecasts. Although they are not really good enough for our uses, we still manage to put up with them. No doubt this is because they come free with our operating systems and the majority of people prefer to put up with a free one instead of buying a new one.
Although spreadsheets have their downsides, they do have advantages and are useful for a number of uses. The main ones are that they can handle simple calculations, they can create graphics, create business forecasts to see how much money you will lose. They all prove to be useful at some point in time. However, because of the amount of downsides they have, they aren’t useful for tasks like tracking your companies’ UK fixed assets.
Although it may sound appropriate for storing information about your company assets, it’s simply not as advanced as an asset tracking software UK package.
Up until a point, asset management can live with a spreadsheet, however, once you wish to start storing more assets and keeping more data about each item, the spreadsheet quickly becomes useless.
Here is a list of a few features that every asset management software package should contain.
• They are required to store enough in-depth data about your items. Although a standard spreadsheet has the ability to store vasts amount of data, in some cases it may not be sufficient. The data that has been stored may also not be in enough depth for it’s use.
• They must be able to match the complex structure of the company. If the asset can be placed in a number of categories within the company, a simple spreadsheet cannot handle this complex structure.
• They should be flexible enough to restructure easily. As soon as a spreadsheet becomes complex, it’s hard to modifity and data and the structure of it.
• It must be able to cope with calculating several different depreciation levels on different assets. If items were bought at different points in time, for example a computer and a monitor. The software should be capable enough to store individual price depreciation levels.
• The software should be able to do re-lifeing of business assets. If one of your assets is assessed and found to be no longer useless, the levels of depreciation on the item should be changed.
• They must be able to export the data into structured reports. Spreadsheets cannot easily created a structured data report.
Those were just a few of the points that a specifically designed asset management software package must include. Also it’s the reason why a spreadsheet is not good for adding asset data to a fixed asset register.