Physical Asset Auditing – verifying your assets

What is Asset Auditing?

Essentially, asset auditing is a physical verification process that compares an organisation’s “official list” of assets (normally contained within an asset management system) to the actual assets physically located within your business sites. By conducting this examination, you are confirming that the assets listed on your business balance sheet are real (or exist physically).

Establishing the existence and location of an organisation’s assets, and evaluating their usable condition is a crucial business task for small and large organisations.

When it comes to asset management, certainty depends on a single source of truth. The reliability of your data lives or dies on the quality and integrity of your asset register data and also houses all the fundamental activity about every asset in your business.

Why you need to audit assets

Physically auditing your assets and equipment or performing inventory stock-take or wall-to-wall audits, are just some of the terminology used to describe the verification or confirmation of assets in an auditing process. The next step is to reconcile this data with your asset register, which is critical for operational and financial reasons.

A 2017 UK study of “what happens when you don’t adhere to routine audits” estimates that almost one in five instances of business fraud involves assets with an average loss of $70,000 in small businesses.

What is the Objective of Physically Verifying Assets?

Monitoring assets can be a tough task for all organisations (large or small). Assets can be moved to different areas, get reassigned to other people, get changed or replaced, and so on. Effective asset management requires reports about the allocation of assets, utilisation, and service records.

Tracking fixed and portable assets and ensuring they are available, in good condition and locatable, is a critical aspect of the modern asset manager. Authorising individuals in your organisation to perform quick and easy audits via mobile apps, or even asking employees to ‘self-audit assets (in their possession), is a fast and accurate way to keep visibility and control.

Full physical audits that include all your locations (wall-to-wall) can typically be completed 90% quicker (and definitely more accurate) than a manual paper and pen approach when using barcode labels and/or RFID tags.

Asset Auditing with your Smartphone and Tablet

Any sized business with a lot of assets needs to conduct audits (i.e. physical counts) to verify that the assets are locatable. Whilst revealing any missing, damaged or obsolete assets.

By using the Hardcat smartphone app MiCatX, employees can scan in assets (at the audit location) or ‘self-audit (assets in their possession) and submit data to the server. As the server updates your Hardcat database there is no more manual exports and imports. There is also an option to work in an off-line mode for areas where there is no internet connection. More information on access to data with a limited internet connection.

Your Hardcat database will then do the job of comparing audit data with the assets registered in your database and producing an audit report. These reports are extremely useful in identifying missing and misplaced assets.

Your asset audit projects will take just minutes instead of hours or days, and you will have accurate digital records of all performed audits, and an up-to-date asset register.

Using MiCatX for your asset audits allows your business to perform this important task at any time and from anywhere. Because not constantly auditing your assets increases the opportunity for theft, misplacement, loss, and unconfirmed damages.

• Fast and easy asset audits using tablets and/or mobile phones
• Run regular audits to increases overall accountability and transparency
• Auditing your assets will assist with identifying database discrepancies and isolating errors
• keep your company compliant with regulations
• Routine audits safeguard your business in the case of external audits

Leverage 32 years of Experience with 1000+ Audit Operations

Hardcat specialises in the process required to data capture asset details and has a complete understanding of both barcoding as well as RFID capabilities. We have performed thousands of data capture exercises around the world and have written application programs for smartphones and tablets (iOS and Android to capture data as well as perform asset audits.

Hardcat solutions have been proven in thousands of exercises with fast capture rates. Proving we can reduce the cost of your audit using our fast, efficient audit and reconciliation services, using mobile asset audit tools, asset audit software and our Hardcat Professional Services team.

Asset Discovery – discover assets you never knew you had! These newly discovered assets will be added to your asset register for you to claim immediate tax rebates.

Asset Search and Find – find assets that you have not been able to locate before! This allows for write-offs thereby actioning immediate taxation rebates.

Highlight Assets – catalogue for disposal of any nonstandard assets or in poor condition, past expiry, redundant or no longer in use.

Zoos Victoria engaged the Hardcat Team

Hardcat have taken the pain out of conducting audits and reconciliation by automating portions of the process and adhering to Hardcat’s proven methodology.

This significantly enhanced the accuracy and speed of our audit minimising the impact on our daily operations.

Zoos Victoria engaged Hardcat Services Team

Hardcat solutions will supply you with everything you need to conduct your own asset audit verification project, or use our services team for a quick and easy audit.

Let us Help You!

Don’t have Hardcat software but still need audit and reconciliation services? No problem, we can utilise our software and technologies to deliver an accurate asset register in the format that you require without the upfront costs of hardware and software!

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