The Handover Nobody Is Asked to Do
An officer transfers out at the end of the month. Somewhere in the building are a laptop, two tablets, a projector and a set of keys that were signed out to them over four years. Our register can tell you exactly what they hold — the list is one click away on their own record. Nothing in the process of them leaving asks the question, and nothing stops them going.
A handover in a public entity is a formal thing. There is a memo, there is a date, there is an incoming officer and an outgoing one, and somewhere in the file there should be a list of what passed between them. Six months later, when a piece of equipment cannot be found, that list is the only thing standing between an inconvenience and a query. Everybody knows this. It still goes wrong constantly, and the reason is rarely that the register was bad.
It goes wrong because a handover is an event — a moment when somebody has to be asked a question — and most asset registers are built as state: a set of fields describing who currently holds what. State is easy to keep accurate while people remember to update it. The whole difficulty of a handover is that the person with the most reason to update it is the person leaving.
This post is about where our register sits on that line. It is strong on state, and specifically strong in ways that matter for an audit. It does nothing whatsoever at the event.
What the register does well, and it is not a small list
Custody in this product is not a field that gets overwritten. Every change of hands is a movement — a dated row that records what happened and cannot be quietly edited away — and the movement carries considerably more than the new holder's name.
| Recorded on every movement | Why it matters at a handover |
|---|---|
| Custodian before and after | The chain of responsibility is explicit, not inferred from an edit history |
| Department, location and warehouse, before and after | Where the item physically moved, not just who is answerable |
| Condition before and condition after | The state it was handed over in — the single most disputed fact later |
| Who performed it, and when | Attribution on the action itself |
| Who approved it, when — or who rejected it, and why | A second pair of eyes, where policy requires one |
| Latitude and longitude, where policy requires it | Where the person was standing when they recorded it |
| Expected return date | For items going out temporarily rather than transferring |
| Free-text notes and the scan event, if it was scanned | Context, and proof the item was physically present |
Movement approval is configurable rather than all-or-nothing, which is the setting most public entities will want. You can require approval on every movement, on none, or — the default — only on assets that meet a high-risk policy, with a value threshold you set. You can choose which actions the policy covers, and you can mark an individual asset as always requiring approval regardless. GPS capture can be required per action.
And the register does know what each person holds. That is not an inference from a report; it is a defined relationship between an employee and the assets in their custody. It is loaded on the employee's own detail page, it appears as a count against every custodian in the custodian list, and the asset reports will sort custodians by how many assets they are carrying.
The register can answer "what does this officer hold" in one click. Nothing in the process of them leaving asks the question.
Nothing initiates the handover
The product does have an offboarding concept. An employee record has an employment status, and a service exists that treats a terminated employee as offboarded, works out whether they still have a working login, and can revoke it. There is an access audit that lists offboarded employees who can still sign in — a genuinely useful control, and one plenty of organisations lack.
That service is about logins. Searching it for any reference to assets returns nothing. There is no hook on termination that looks at what the person is holding, no checklist that appears, no flag on the employee record, no report of leavers with outstanding custody, and nothing anywhere that treats an unreturned asset as a reason to pause anything.
An officer with eleven assets is marked terminated
The information is complete and correct throughout. Nobody is misled by the data. The failure is that nothing prompts anyone to look at it at the one moment it is decisive.
And when you do it, it is one asset at a time
Suppose the handover does happen properly, because somebody is diligent. An outgoing officer holding forty items hands over to their successor. That is forty separate transfer actions, each recorded individually.
There is no bulk custody transfer — no way to select a custodian, choose a successor, and move everything in one recorded action. Assets can be bulk imported, which is a different thing entirely and often mistaken for this in a demo. For a handover of any size, the correct process is real work, and processes that are real work are the ones that get skipped when somebody is leaving on Friday.
The signature exists now. Nothing asks for it
This was the third gap when this article was first published, and for a public entity it was the most important, because it goes to what the record actually proves. It has since half closed, and the half that remains open is the more interesting one.
A movement records who performed it and, where policy requires, who approved it. Since August 2026 it can also carry a captured signature — a mark drawn by the incoming custodian, with their printed name and the moment they signed, takeable while the movement is still pending and fixed once it is approved. So the field now exists, and the record can be made by the receiving officer rather than merely about them.
What has not changed is that nothing requires it. Signing is optional by design, and no part of the leaving process prompts anybody to collect a mark — so a storekeeper can still transfer forty assets to a colleague who never touched a screen and may not know it happened. The register will show that colleague as the custodian, dated and attributed, and it will be a perfectly good record of what somebody entered. Whether it is also evidence that the person accepted responsibility now depends entirely on your own discipline, which is a better position than having no field at all and a worse one than having a process.
What this means for your file
A captured mark with a printed name and a timestamp is real evidence that the incoming officer accepted the item, and for most internal handovers it is enough. It is not a certified e-signature — no certificate, no key pair, no eIDAS or ESIGN claim — so if your procedure requires a signed instrument rather than an acknowledgement, that document still has to exist outside this system. Put the signature step on your clearance form; the system will hold the mark, but it will not ask for it.
What to do about all three
None of these gaps requires you to wait for software. They require you to put a person or a form where the software is silent, deliberately, and to write that down.
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Make custody a named step in the exit procedure
The employee record shows what they hold. Someone has to open it. Put that in the clearance form as a line item with a signature, the same way you would for keys or an identity card.
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Run the custodian list as a standing report
The custodian list carries an asset count per person. Reviewed monthly against your staff list, it surfaces holders who no longer work there. It is a manual reconciliation, and it takes minutes.
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Do the transfers before the last day, not after
Forty individual movements is an hour's work with the outgoing officer present. It is a fortnight of chasing once they have gone.
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Use condition capture properly during the handover
Condition before and after is recorded on every movement and is the field most likely to matter later. A handover done with the item in hand is worth far more than one done from a list.
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Require approval on the transfers that matter
Set the movement approval policy so that high-value transfers need a second person. That is the closest thing in the product to a countersignature, and it is configurable today.
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Keep the signed memo
The register does not capture acceptance. Your paper or scanned acknowledgement remains the artefact that proves it, and it should reference the asset codes.
What the register gives you
- A dated, attributed movement for every change of custody
- Condition recorded before and after each hand-over
- Configurable approval — none, all movements, or high-risk only
- Optional GPS capture on the actions you choose
- What any individual currently holds, on their own record
- A count of assets against every custodian, sortable
- Verification as a separate, dated confirmation that an item was seen
What it does not give you
- Any prompt, flag or block when a custodian is terminated
- A report of leavers with outstanding assets
- Bulk transfer of one person's custody to their successor
- A signature or acknowledgement from the receiving custodian
- A handover document generated from the register
- Any link between the exit process and the asset register
Questions worth asking any vendor
Ask to see it happen
- Mark an employee as leaving. Show me every screen that changes.
- Show me the report of people who have left and still hold assets.
- Transfer one person's entire custody to their successor. How many actions is that?
- Where does the incoming custodian confirm they accepted the items?
- Can I produce a handover document from the system, listing what passed and in what condition?
- Who approved the transfer, and can a transfer be made to require approval by value?
The first and fourth questions are the ones that find the boundary fastest. Every register will show you a custodian field. Very few will do anything at the moment that field is about to become wrong, and fewer still will have the receiving person confirm anything at all.
Built and verified in the code
- Movement-based custody. Every change of hands writes a dated row recording custodian, department, location and warehouse before and after, rather than overwriting a field.
- Condition before and after on every movement, which is the fact most often disputed after a handover.
- Configurable movement approval — none, all movements, or high-risk only by default — with a value threshold you set, a per-action policy, and a per-asset flag that always requires approval.
- Approval and rejection recorded, with the approver, the timestamp and the rejection reason.
- Optional GPS capture per action, including on verification.
- What each person holds, as a defined relationship surfaced on the employee record, as a count on every custodian, and as a sortable column in the asset reports.
- Verification as a separate dated action, stamping who confirmed the item exists and when.
- An access audit for leavers, listing offboarded employees who still hold a working login.
More we can add — each one verified against the code
- Termination connected to custody: a hook, a flag, a task or a block. The offboarding service handles logins today, and a search of it for any reference to assets comes back empty.
- A leavers-with-assets report. The information exists on each employee record; nothing aggregates it.
- A bulk custody transfer. Moving one person's holdings to their successor is one action per asset. The bulk facility on the asset screens is an import, which is a different thing.
- A required signature. A movement already carries a captured mark from the incoming custodian, with a printed name and a timestamp; it is optional today, and no part of the leaving process prompts anybody to collect it.
- A handover document, generating a list of what passed between two custodians for signing and filing.
- Expected-return enforcement on a leaver. Overdue returns are counted as a general figure; they are not tied to anyone's departure.
Where the line falls
- If you need a defensible record of who held what, when it moved and in what condition, that exists today and it is thorough.
- If you need the system to stop a leaver walking out with equipment, it will not — put that control in your clearance procedure and give it an owner.
- If your procedure requires a signed acknowledgement of receipt, that document stays outside the system for now.
All three are well-shaped work rather than research: an asset check in the offboarding flow, a leavers-with-custody report, a bulk custody transfer between two custodians in one recorded action, and an acknowledgement step the incoming custodian completes themselves. The acknowledgement is the one we would build first, because it is the one that changes what the record proves.
Verified against the repository on 7 August 2026. That the offboarding path contains no asset check was established by searching that service and its controller for the word, rather than by failing to find a feature.
Anything above that you need, we can build for you
Everything listed above as something we can add describes what ships in the standard product today — it is a starting point, not a limit on what AWRA OpsHub can do for your organisation. Kenya's eTIMS integration and its maintained payroll engine are both in the product because clients needed them and commissioned them; neither appeared by itself, and the same door is open for whatever you just read about. One qualification so this is worth what it claims: a small number of things on this blog we deliberately leave to a specialist rather than build — a statutory ledger we will not sign our name to, a rule that would decide a tax question for you, a clinical or member-funds record that belongs in a regulated system — and where that is true the post says so in those words. Everything else is a scope, a timeline and a price.
The operational work, which is what most commissions actually are
An extra approval stage in a chain that does not match the standard one, a custom field set on employees or assets that only your sector needs, an expiry that has to block an order rather than send an email, a report your board asks for in a shape nothing produces, or a scanner or weighbridge feeding the goods-in door. These are the commissions we are asked for most often and the smallest ones we quote — and unlike a revenue-authority pipeline, none of them waits on a regulator.
The module-shaped additions, which are the ones readers ask for most often
A price list with real discount authority, a customer-facing quotation that expires, a bill of materials or recipe costing, a staff advance that is issued, acquitted and chased, a member or unit ledger, a matching rule that holds a payment. Each of these is a build rather than a setting, and each has been quoted before — a bigger piece of work than a custom field, with a written spec and a date instead of a roadmap slide.
The report, document or pack nothing currently produces
The board pack in the shape your board actually asks for, a donor or funder layout, an invoice or receipt template carrying what your regulator or your customer expects, a dataset the report builder cannot reach yet. Usually the fastest thing on this list to deliver, because the data is already in the system.
Systems, rails and hardware you already run
The accounting package, CRM, online store, core banking or custom database you intend to keep — connected through our API so a fact is entered once and appears everywhere it is needed. Plus the physical edge: a scanner, a scale, a weighbridge or a till peripheral feeding the door it belongs to.
How it works: you describe the requirement, we return a written scope, timeline and cost, and once agreed it is built into your environment and maintained as part of the product. Nothing here waits on a regulator or a published specification, which is why operational builds are the ones we quote fastest. Tell us the requirement that would otherwise rule us out — that is a better first conversation than a demo.
Tell us what your operation needsA register that records custody accurately is worth having, and this one does. What it will not do is tap anyone on the shoulder. In a public entity, where handovers are scheduled events with paperwork attached, that is a gap you can close with a line on a clearance form — provided somebody wrote the line, which is the only reason this post exists.
Send us your clearance procedure
If you are specifying an asset register for a public entity, send the handover or clearance procedure it has to support. We will map it step by step against what the register does today and tell you exactly which steps still need a person and a form.
Talk to us about asset custody in the public sector