Asset Disposal & Lifecycle

Assets end. They get scrapped, sold, written off, lost or stolen. When that happens the asset has to leave the active register — otherwise every stock-take from then on hunts for something that no longer exists and reports it as missing, forever.

But it must not be deleted. Last year's audit said you had 1,000 assets, and it named them. If disposal erased the record, that audit would be talking about assets that no longer exist anywhere in the system, and you could no longer answer the auditor's next question: "which one was that?"

AssetBase resolves this the way an asset register should: a disposed asset is flagged, never removed.

The Two Ideas That Make This Work

1. Lifecycle is its own field

Every asset has a lifecycle state — where it sits in its life, from arrival to departure.

This is deliberately separate from the other two things that sound similar:

They are genuinely different questions, and collapsing them loses information you need. A forklift can be in service, operational and dented all at the same time — and a stock-take must still expect to find it. It stops being expected only when someone decides it is leaving.

Damaged is not disposed. A cracked, unusable machine sitting in the corner of the yard is still yours and is still on the floor — record that as a condition, not a disposal. It becomes disposed the day it is actually scrapped, sold or written off.

The states you start with

AssetBase ships eleven states, ready to use. Two columns decide everything the system does with them:

Read the two columns as two separate questions:

• Expected on site — should a stock-take expect to physically find it? An asset that is not expected is never reported missing. But if it does turn up, it still counts as found — being off-site is an expectation, not a prohibition.
• In the register — is the asset still yours in any practical sense? The bottom five are the ways an asset leaves. They are excluded from every reconciliation, and they stop being billed.

Which one should I use?

The single most useful distinction on this page: retired means it stopped working for you; disposed means it left. A retired forklift is still audited. A disposed one is not.

2. Disposed means "out of the register", not "deleted"

When you dispose of an asset it keeps everything: its ID, its RFID tag, its photos, its documents, its custody history, its scan trail, and its place in every audit it ever appeared in.

What changes is that it:

• disappears from the register list, counts, exports and category totals;
• is excluded from every future stock-take — never expected, never reported missing;
• shows a clear "not in the active register" warning wherever it is opened or scanned.

Disposing of an Asset

Open the asset in the register and choose Dispose.

The reason is mandatory, and that is on purpose. The moment of disposal is the only time anybody actually knows why the asset left. A year later, "why is this gone?" is the first question an auditor asks, and nobody remembers.

Checked-out assets. If the asset is still signed out to somebody, AssetBase stops and asks. Either check it in first, or confirm that it was disposed of while in their custody — the disposal then releases the custody record. It is a decision, not a silent side effect.

Retired is not disposed

Retired means withdrawn from use but still owned and still on your premises. A retired generator is still there, and a stock-take should still find it — so retired assets stay in the register and stay audited.

Use Disposed only when the asset has physically gone.

In transit / on loan

Two states sit in between: In transit and On loan. These assets are still yours, but they are legitimately not on the floor. They are never reported missing, and they still count as found if they do turn up during a stock-take.

Seeing Disposed Assets

The register shows the active register by default. To see what has left, use the drop-down at the top of the register:

• Active register — the default; everything still live
• a specific state — Disposed, Sold, Lost, Stolen…
• Everything (incl. disposed) — the full history in one list

Every disposed asset is still fully openable, searchable by tag or serial, and exportable.

Scanning a Disposed Asset

This is the situation the design cares about most: someone is walking the yard and scans a tag on a unit that was scrapped three months ago.

AssetBase resolves the tag and tells the truth:

NOT IN THE ACTIVE REGISTER — Recorded as Disposed on 12 March — engine block cracked beyond economical repair. It is excluded from stock-takes.

It does not say "unknown tag". Telling an operator that a tag is unrecognised, when the system knows exactly which asset it belonged to, is worse than useless — it invites them to register it a second time and create a duplicate.

The scan is still logged. A scrapped tag still circulating on the floor is exactly the kind of thing your evidence trail should be capturing.

This works offline too. Handhelds carry the disposal flag in their normal sync, so a device that has been out of signal for a week still warns correctly.

Disposed Assets in Audits

The rule is simple: disposed assets are not part of a reconciliation.

A disposed asset found on the floor is a known asset that should not be there, not an unregistered rogue tag. Keeping the two apart matters: the system will never offer to "add to register" an asset you deliberately disposed of.

Past audits never change

A disposal today has no effect on any audit already completed. Each audit freezes its own copy of the register at the moment it was reconciled, and its report PDF is stored, not re-rendered.

Audit 1,000 assets in January, dispose four in February, audit again — February says 996 and January still says 1,000, permanently. Both are correct, and both stay that way.

Reinstating an Asset

Disposals get reversed. It was in the other yard; the write-off was raised against the wrong tag; the "stolen" unit came back.

Open the disposed asset and choose Reinstate, with a reason. The asset returns to the state it was in before disposal (a stored asset goes back to storage, not to "in service") and rejoins the register and all future stock-takes immediately.

The original disposal record is kept. "We wrote this off and then un-wrote it" is itself a fact an auditor is entitled to see, so reinstatement is recorded as its own event rather than erasing what came before.

Disposal vs Delete

Both exist, and they are not interchangeable.

If you try to delete an asset that appears in a completed audit, AssetBase stops you and points you at disposal instead. Deleting it would leave that audit's records pointing at nothing.

Rule of thumb: if the asset ever physically existed, dispose of it. Delete is only for cleaning up data-entry mistakes.

Customising the Lifecycle States (Administrators)

The lifecycle list ships ready to use — In service, In storage, In repair, In transit, On loan, Retired, Disposed, Sold, Lost, Stolen, Destroyed — and you can adapt it to your own language.

You can:

• rename any state, including the built-in ones, so it matches your paperwork ("Boarded", "Written off", "Condemned");
• add your own states;
• retire a state you have stopped using — it leaves the drop-down while every asset already in it stays readable and correct.

Changing a state is not an edit like any other. Moving an asset into a disposal state is done through Dispose, with a reason — not by picking it from the drop-down on the asset form. Editing an asset's state to disposed is refused, because a disposal has to produce a dated record of who did it and why, and a silent field edit produces nothing. In the same way, an unrecognised state is rejected rather than created.

Every state you add must declare two things, because these are what the audit engine reads:

There is no sensible default for either, which is why AssetBase asks rather than guessing: guessing wrong would quietly corrupt an audit.

Two guard rails on the built-in states:

• They cannot be retired. Removing Disposed would leave you unable to dispose of anything.
• Their meaning cannot be changed — only their name. Redefining what "disposed" means would retroactively change how every audit you have already signed off should be read.

Unlike asset categories, the lifecycle list does not fill itself in. A category is a label; a lifecycle state is a rule the audit engine acts on. Typing an unrecognised state is treated as an error, not as an invitation to invent a new one.

Frequently Asked

• AB-010 — The Asset Register
• AB-024 — Capturing Condition at Scan
• AB-030 — Audits & Compliance