ENES
Assets & Inventory

Asset basics

Asset basics

An asset is a single thing your team owns and is accountable for — a laptop, a server, a switch, a monitor, a license. In lazyit the asset is the first-class record: people come and go, but the asset stays, and its whole history travels with it. You manage assets from the Assets area.

Registering an asset

Open Assets and choose New asset. The form captures:

  • Name — required, your own label for the unit (for example Ada's laptop or SW-CORE-01). lazyit does not enforce a naming convention; pick one that suits your team.
  • Status — required (see below).
  • Model — optional. Link the asset to an asset model (its make/model). Picking a model can pre-fill custom fields from the model’s defaults.
  • Location — optional. Where the unit physically lives. See Locations.
  • Serial and Asset tag — both optional (see Serial and asset tag below).
  • Company — optional grouping label (see Company below).
  • Purchase date and Warranty end — optional dates.
  • Purchase & depreciation — optional cost fields (see Cost & depreciation below).
  • Notes and Custom fields — optional free-form detail.

Under Head start you can optionally assign the first owner right away: pick a user and, when you create the asset, they’re recorded as its current owner in the same step. Leaving it blank keeps the classic flow — ownership is otherwise a separate step you take once the asset exists (see Assignments & history). If the assignment part fails for any reason, the asset is still created; you’ll just be asked to assign the owner from the asset.

Registering a batch of similar units? Use Create & add another instead of Create asset: it saves the current one and keeps the form open with the model, location, company and status carried over, clearing just the name, serial and asset tag so you can type the next unit straight away.

Registering many at once

If you have a whole spreadsheet of gear to bring in, don’t type them one by one — use the bulk Import. The Import button sits next to Export at the top of the Assets list (and the empty Assets screen offers an Import from CSV link), taking you straight to the guided bulk import wizard. The button appears only if you have permission to run an import.

Status

Every asset is classified by a status — there is no default, so you choose one when you register it. The values are:

  • Operational — in active service.
  • In maintenance — temporarily out for repair or servicing.
  • In storage — kept in stock, not currently in use.
  • Retired — decommissioned, kept for the record.
  • Lost — unaccounted for.
  • Unknown — status not established.

Status appears as a colored badge in the list and on the detail page. Changing it is recorded in the asset’s activity log. You can change it quickly without opening the editor: on the detail page the status badge itself is a dropdown, and in the list the row’s ⋯ menu has a Change status option. You can also set the status of several assets at once from the list.

Serial and asset tag

These are two different things, and both are optional:

  • Serial — the manufacturer’s serial number of the physical unit.
  • Asset tag — your own company label, the one you write on the sticker (for example LZ-0001).

Each is unique among live assets when set: if you try to save a serial or asset tag that another live asset already uses, lazyit refuses it. When an asset is deactivated, its serial and asset tag are freed, so the value can be reused or restored later.

The asset tag is not the asset’s internal identity — lazyit keeps a separate, permanent internal id for links and references. The asset tag is a human-facing label you can change at any time. If you want lazyit to assign asset tags automatically from a running number, see Asset tags.

Company

Company is an optional grouping label on an asset — a way to tag which organization, business unit or client an asset belongs to (handy if you manage gear for several clients, or split kit by legal entity). It is only for grouping, filtering and reporting: it is not an access control. Company does not hide anything — anyone who can see assets sees all assets regardless of their company; setting it simply lets you narrow the list to one company when you want to.

It is a free-text field with autocomplete: as you type, lazyit suggests companies you’ve already used on other assets, so you reuse the same spelling instead of creating near-duplicates — but you can always type a brand-new value. There is no separate “companies” screen to manage: a company exists simply because at least one asset uses it.

On the asset detail page the company is shown when set, and links to the list filtered by that company. You can filter and add a Company column to the list (see below).

Cost & depreciation

Under Purchase & depreciation you can optionally record what an asset cost and how long it’s expected to serve. All three fields are optional — leave them blank for gear whose value you don’t track.

  • Purchase cost — what you paid for the unit.
  • Useful life — how long you expect to use it, in months (for example 36 for three years).
  • Salvage value — its estimated worth at the end of that life. Defaults to 0 if left blank.

When a purchase cost is set, the asset’s detail page shows a Book value — the asset’s worth today under straight-line depreciation: the value falls in equal steps from the purchase cost down to the salvage value across the useful life, then holds at the salvage value. If you set a cost but no useful life, the book value simply stays at the purchase cost (there’s nothing to depreciate over). Assets with no purchase cost show no book value at all.

Amounts are plain numbers — lazyit is single-organization and doesn’t attach a currency, so enter and read them in whatever currency your team uses.

Custom fields

Different kinds of asset carry different attributes — a laptop has RAM and a CPU, a switch has a port count and an IP. Rather than force a fixed set of columns, lazyit stores these as custom fields: a free-form list of name/value pairs on the asset (for example ram → 16GB, ip → 10.0.0.4).

Add, edit or remove rows in the Custom fields section of the form. When you pick a model that has default specs, those values are copied in as a starting point — you can change them for this individual unit before saving. Custom fields are shown as a tidy label/value list on the detail page.

If the asset’s category defines a specs dictionary, the form suggests those expected fields and shows gentle warnings (a required field left blank, a value that doesn’t match its type, or an unexpected field). These hints are advisory only — you can always save.

Finding assets in the list

The Assets list has a search box and a Status dropdown right in the toolbar, plus a Filters button that opens a small panel for the rest. The search box matches an asset’s name, serial, asset tag, and its model’s name or manufacturer — so searching a model like “ThinkPad” or “Pro 14” finds every asset carrying it, even though the model isn’t in the name.

  • Category and Location — narrow to one model category or one place.
  • Company — narrow to one company (the grouping label above). Only companies in use appear.
  • Owner — show only the assets currently assigned to a specific person. Start typing a name to pick them; the list then shows just that person’s live assignments.
  • Ownership — filter by whether an asset has any current owner at all (Has owners / No owners), regardless of who.
  • Warranty — narrow to assets whose warranty is about to lapse (Expiring ≤ 90d) or has already lapsed (Expired). This filter has no toolbar control: it appears as a chip when you arrive from the dashboard’s Needs attention warranty tile (which links to Expiring ≤ 90d), and you clear it by removing the chip.

The Filters button shows a small count of how many of these are active. Every filter you set also appears as a removable chip below the toolbar, and the filters live in the page address, so a filtered view is easy to undo, share or bookmark.

On the asset detail page, both Model and Category are links back into this list: Model narrows to that exact model, Category to every model in that category — a quick way to see “what else is this exact model” versus “what else is in this category.”

Exporting the inventory

The Export (filtered) button at the top of the Assets page downloads a CSV of the inventory that matches your current filters — the whole result set, not just the page in front of you. Set the status, category, location, company, owner or search you care about first (for example all the Dell servers in the colo that are out of warranty), then export just that slice. The file carries one row per asset with its name, asset tag, serial, status, category, manufacturer, model, location, company, purchase and warranty dates, current owners, notes and the created/updated timestamps, and is safe to open in a spreadsheet. Custom specs fields are not included in this version. If you have the Show archived view open, the export is that archived slice instead.

Choosing which columns to show

The Columns button (next to Filters) opens a checklist of the table’s columns — asset tag, model, category, location, company, status, owners and updated. Untick the ones you don’t care about to slim the table down to what matters for you. The Name column and the row actions always stay. Your choice is remembered in this browser, so the table keeps the same shape next time you visit. (This governs the desktop table; the mobile card view always shows the full set.)

Assets on the topology map

If an asset backs a node on the Infrastructure diagram — for example a host, a NAS or a switch you’ve placed on the map — its detail page shows an On topology badge next to the status, and the same marker appears as a small share glyph beside the asset’s name in the list. A View in topology button on the detail page jumps straight to the map, flying to that node and giving it a brief highlight so you can spot which one it is at a glance. (You only see these when you have permission to view the topology.) The reverse link exists too: a node’s details panel links its inventory name back to this asset, so you can move between an asset and its node in either direction.

Documents

An asset can carry documents — warranty PDFs, purchase receipts, damage photos — kept on the asset record instead of scattered across drives and chat threads. The Documents section on the asset’s detail page lists them with their name, size and upload date.

  • Upload with the button, or drag and drop files onto the section. Supported types are PDF, PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF, TXT, CSV, DOCX and XLSX, up to 25 MB each.
  • Download opens the file. Documents are served only to people who can read the asset — they are never on a public link.
  • Delete removes a document after a confirmation. Like the rest of lazyit this is reversible at the storage layer; the record of who uploaded it is kept.
  • Uploading and deleting need the asset-write permission; anyone who can view the asset can download.

Backups. Attachments are stored on the server’s file volume, which is not yet covered by the database backup. Until backup support ships, keep an independent copy of anything irreplaceable.

Editing, cloning and deactivating

  • Edit updates the asset in place; each meaningful change (status, location, model, custom fields) is written to the activity log.
  • Clone opens a new asset pre-filled from this one, with the serial and asset tag cleared so the copy gets its own — handy for registering a batch of identical units.
  • Deactivating an asset is a soft delete: the record is hidden from the normal list but never destroyed, so its history is preserved. Deactivated assets can be restored by an administrator, which also reclaims their freed serial and asset tag (unless a live asset has taken the value meanwhile). lazyit never hard-deletes asset data.

What’s next