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Assets for Kenya

Every asset has an owner, a location, and an alibi

Registers that track reality — custodians by name, movements approved, verification by phone, maintenance on schedule, and disposals on the record.

Sound familiar?

If any of these ring true, you are exactly who this was built for.

The register from 2022

Accurate the day it was typed; fiction after two office moves and one staff exit.

Equipment issued to "the office"

No named custodian means no accountability when it walks.

Maintenance by breakdown

Generators and vehicles get attention only after they fail — at the worst moment.

Disposals nobody documented

Assets vanish from use but never from the books — until an audit asks.

A custody register, and why that is not a fixed asset register

Running in the product today

  • A named custodian on every item, with location, condition captured at each hand-off, full movement history and documents attached — which is the record that answers who had it in March.
  • Check-out and check-in as events, so a hand-off is what updates the register rather than somebody remembering to update it afterwards.
  • Verification rounds on a rhythm you set, with the result recorded against the item rather than in a spreadsheet beside it.
  • Documents and photographs against the asset, previewable in place — which is the file nobody has time to assemble after a loss or a claim.
  • Purchase cost held on the item, and cost coded to site, project, funder or cost centre at entry.
  • Offline capture, so a verification round at a remote site does not depend on a signal.

Absences — on the roadmap, and commissionable now

  • No accounting depreciation. This is the important one and our own code says so in a warning comment: the value trend shown in the module is a decline estimate, it is NOT book value, and no journal posting for depreciation is ever made. A per-class rate, a method, a convention and a posting to the ledger would be a real depreciation engine, and that is not what this is.
  • No maintenance layer. No service interval, no next-service date, no work orders and no parts. Custody and condition are real; the workshop calendar is not here.
  • No fuel log and no distance held anywhere, so fuel-per-kilometre cannot be computed for a vehicle however complete the rest of its record is.
  • No barcode or RFID scanning hardware integration. Items are identified by their record and their tag number, entered rather than scanned.

What we would decline, and would rather say now

  • We will not present the value trend as book value, and you should not either. A vendor whose asset module quietly produces a number that looks like accumulated depreciation is handing your accountant a figure no auditor will accept. Ours is labelled as an estimate in the product and in the code, which is deliberate and is not going to change into a silent accounting feature.
  • We will not become a maintenance management system. Service scheduling, work orders and parts inventory is a real product with real users, and a weak version buried inside an operations platform would serve nobody. We hold custody and condition and integrate with whatever runs the workshop.

A real depreciation engine — per-class rates, a method, a convention and journal postings — is scoped, priceable work rather than a research problem, and so is a scanning integration. Both are commissionable now on a written specification, a timeline and a price agreed before any money moves. The evidence this is a genuine offer is Kenya, where the eTIMS transmission and the statutory payroll engine were both built exactly that way.

The distinction worth carrying into a shortlist: your finance system knows what you own and what it is worth; this knows who has it, where it went and what condition it came back in. Those are different registers answering different questions, and the second one is the one that gets asked in an audit or after a loss. Run both.

How teams get started

1

Import the register

Your existing list loaded — tags, values, locations, custodians.

2

Verify physically

A mobile verification round reconciles the register to reality.

3

Keep it living

Movements, maintenance, and quarterly checks keep it reconciled forever.

Questions we are asked here

Frequently asked questions

What should go on the register?

Everything above your capitalization threshold plus attractive items regardless of value — phones, laptops, cameras, tools. A common Kenyan policy registers from KES 5,000–10,000 upward.

Can assets be created from purchases automatically?

Yes — received purchase orders can create assets directly, inheriting supplier, cost, and funding reference, so the register grows from transactions instead of manual entry.

How does staff exit clearance work?

Custodian clearance lists everything issued to the person; returns are recorded at handover and gaps surface before final dues — not after.

Do you handle donor-funded assets for NGOs?

Yes — assets carry funding grant tags, and per-grant disposition reports for donor closeouts export in minutes. See the NGO asset management page for that workflow.

Close the register-vs-reality gap

Bring your current asset list — watch it become a living register with custody and history.