Furniture Inventory Asset Management Makes a Difference to Your Bottom Line

Furniture inventory asset management is a significant investment in any organization, and you should manage it appropriately. The first scenario that likely comes to mind is your typical corporate environment outfitted with office furnishings like chairs, desks, filing cabinets, credenzas, and conference tables and equipped with a facilities management team. Hotels, restaurants, hospitals and medical offices, government offices, schools, and universities also spend countless dollars to furnish their premises.

Why Furniture Inventory Asset Management Matters

Furniture inventory asset management isn’t a “set it and forget it” function. Organizations need to keep organized, real-time records of their furniture inventory for several reasons, including:

• Simply knowing what you have and where it’s located allows you to make more informed decisions about your needs. This includes inventory in your office and the furniture you may be storing in an off-site warehouse. With this knowledge, you can utilize your existing inventory instead of purchasing new items when they’re not needed.
• You can determine the condition of any item, including its complete maintenance history.
• You can create work orders for items that require repairs and track their status.
• A furniture inventory asset management platform enables facilities managers to generate and share reports for planning and budgeting purposes.
• These systems make asset check-in and check-out easy and can be set up to require an electronic signature for additional accountability.
• Real-time asset management reduces theft and loss.
• It’s easier to track and report depreciation for accounting purposes.
• You can track all pertinent details associated with any furniture asset – for example, its warranty – so you don’t have to spend time hunting down this information or where you purchased a particular item if you have a question for the seller.
• With access to your entire furniture inventory, your facilities managers can determine which pieces are configurable, which saves you money.
• Better furniture inventory asset management allows you to maximize your investments and extend their useful lives.

Some organizations store their excess furniture inventory in spare offices or conference rooms, which isn’t a terribly efficient or professional way to utilize office space. While facilities managers might fear losing track of items placed in a storage facility or warehouse, a furniture inventory asset management system assigns a unique barcode to each piece of furniture. At any time, facilities managers have access to all the information they need about the whereabouts and condition of these items.

How Much Does the Average Company Invest in Furniture?

It's difficult to determine how much the average company spends on furniture. However, Projection Hub, a web application that helps entrepreneurs create financial projections, studied 630 startups that had built furniture expenditure into their forecasts and calculated an average startup cost for office interiors of $21,000.

It’s essential for any organization to conduct an audit of their fixed assets – mainly as they draw up budgets and forecast their staffing needs for the coming year. Any organization that uses a manual tracking procedure is more likely to make mistakes in its auditing. That’s because relying on an Excel spreadsheet for your furniture inventory asset management is risky. It’s very easy to enter a typo when you’re manually keying in barcode numbers, and it’s equally easy to forget to update your records.

Subsequently, items can appear to fall through the cracks, causing unwelcome surprises later when you determine that you don’t have the assets you thought you did.

Asset Panda's Furniture Inventory Software

With Asset Panda, your total solution for furniture inventory asset management is as near as your smartphone. Download our free mobile app, which includes a built-in scanner and syncs with the cloud for real-time data access. It’s completely customizable, easy to integrate with your legacy systems, and effortless to use.

Give Asset Panda's furniture asset management software a try with a free 14-day trial (no credit card required)! You’ll receive full access to user guides, video tutorials, free mobile apps, and call-in and live chat support from our fantastic Asset Panda support team.