How Small Businesses Can Benefit From Using Asset Tracking Systems

Easily shortlist and compare the best Asset Tracking Software tools for your small business tracking processes

When it comes to growing and scaling, having a greater understanding of your assets is essential, particularly for small businesses. Asset tracking tools, in the form of both software and hardware, enable small businesses to track, maintain and manage their most critical assets.

Having the ability to track physical assets provides small business owners with a range of cost-efficient and time-saving benefits. Such as helping to provide the right data when audits need to be performed. As well as reducing the loss of stock and equipment through theft.

Why Small Businesses Need to Track Their Assets

It can be easy to presume that asset tracking tools are only relevant to large businesses with a huge variety of different assets. But, this isn’t necessarily true. Small businesses need an asset tracking system just as much as large companies – if not more.

Being able to track assets is essential for small businesses that have invested significant budgets and resource into their assets. The likelihood is that these assets will be essential for the day-to-day running of a business. If an asset is unavailable due to loss or unplanned maintenance, then it can have a large impact on overall operations. Essentially disrupting growth and revenue.

By adding tracking tags to assets, such as RFID tags or Barcodes, businesses can track assets in real time. This is a more efficient way to track assets as opposed to using spreadsheets and whiteboards. With 88% of spreadsheets containing at least one error.

Tracking assets allows small businesses to:

• Have greater visibility of assets
• Reduce costs for lost and stolen assets
• Build an asset register
• Provide data as and when it is needed

Small business asset tracking protocols are typically implemented in a company with the sole purpose of reducing costs by defining asset usage. This, in turn, provides data that can be used in a variety of different ways.

The fact that assets can usually be tracked using a mobile device also makes it an easy and effective option for small businesses. This is particularly true if responsibility for asset tracking is shared between staff. For example, a fleet management or logistics business relies on its vehicles to carry out contracted work. If the vehicles aren’t available, then these contracts can’t be fulfilled.

Asset-Related Challenges For Small Business

Without the use of an asset tracking system or asset tagging tools, a business’s operations can suffer. In 2017, over half of the 1100 small businesses that took part in a survey admitted they did not track their assets. Meaning they were more susceptible to risks than the 16% of small businesses who were using Asset Tracking Software.

There are multiple challenges that small business owners face when neglecting asset management protocols. These include:

Theft

When it comes to replacing assets, it can be a cost that most small businesses want to avoid. Although replacing ageing assets can be beneficial in the long term, replacing assets that have been lost or stolen can be damaging to revenue. In 2017 alone, the theft of assets in the construction sector surpassed £70 million.

Lack of Real-Time Data

Without a system collecting real-time data and building an accurate asset register, businesses can feel left behind when it comes to real-time data. Users are unable to know where assets are located, which can delay jobs. They also have to manually investigate an asset’s availability and who is using it.

Data Errors

Manual asset management methods can result in multiple errors that are mostly related to human error. This mainly affects inventory management and stock counts. Wrong data input can have a negative impact when it comes to performing audits.

Wasting Employee Time

Typical asset tracking systems provide cloud-based capabilities that allow users to use mobile devices to instantly see where assets are located. Without this, employees are often left to track down equipment themselves without knowledge of who last used it and where it was last placed. This results in a lot of time wasted searching for stock or equipment.

Best Asset Tagging Technology for Small Businesses

The key difference between large organisations and small businesses is the amount of revenue they generate. This can directly impact the budget which is allocated to implement tools such as Asset Tracking Software. With this in mind, there are several affordable technology and solutions available to small business owners.

When it comes to choosing the right asset-tracking hardware, there are three key areas that small businesses should be aware of. These are cost, frequency range, and durability.