There are many reasons you will need a record of the technology infrastructure your organisation owns. Keeping track of what you own, its capabilities, warranties and when it needs replacing, will be integral to any IT planning or budgeting you have to do. You may need an asset list for your insurer. If you want to hire external IT support, they will want to know exactly what equipment you have and the condition it’s in. And if something breaks and you want to know whether it’s under warranty, your asset list will tell you.
Making an IT asset list is a time-consuming but not particularly complicated task. You should record every important piece of infrastructure, whether personal computers or central infrastructure such as servers. While the template doesn’t fully cover all the software licence details you might want to keep and isn’t designed to store configuration information you might need, it is a great starting point. We have assumed that peripheral items such as mice, keyboards and monitors don’t need to be recorded, but you can easily tailor the spreadsheet to store this sort of information as well if it is important.
Download the asset list template
Click on the link for a template you can use to record your IT hardware assets. Some example assets have been provided in italics. Some of the cells have a little red spot in the upper right corner – click it for a hint to help you find the information you need to fill in the cell.