YouthBuild Philly Quickly Sees Improvements in Efficiency and Reporting with Asset Panda

After struggling to effectively keep track of their asset inventory through spreadsheets, YouthBuild Philly began vetting a few asset management solutions before ultimately signing on with Asset Panda in February 2023. In only a few short months, the team has already seen a huge change in their ability to manage and report on their asset estate.

Asset Panda Solutions: 

• IT asset management
• Fixed asset management (e.g., furniture, workforce training equipment)
• Fleet management
• Inventory management

YouthBuild Philly is a charter school that empowers young adults between the ages of 17-20 to develop skills and build connections that ensure academic and career success. Founded in 1991, the school offers a two-year program to help these young adults earn their high school diplomas and build vital job skills through academics, vocational training, and community service.

Before using an asset management solution, we were losing track of assets and struggling to keep track of spreadsheets. We just weren’t really sure what was on our books, and doing inventory was very difficult.

Asset Panda offered the most customizability for what we needed. We’re very used to doing things certain ways, and most of the other programs out there were not very customizable or very user-friendly. And it was honestly a really cost-effective option.

Our biggest group of assets is our IT equipment, so staff laptops, staff cell phones, and student computers. We just bought the new building that we’ll be moving into, so there’s going to be a lot of furniture and equipment that goes into that. We train students to become certified in different workforces, so there’s a lot of training equipment that we have on our books that we’ve been tracking. We also track our vehicles that we use to transport things.

[Asset Panda] is really functional in a school setting – we've been able to customize things to the point where we can either assign things to teachers or to specific rooms, and even check things out to students individually. It really helps us track where equipment is moving, be better organized as a school, and hold people accountable as equipment does go missing.

The reporting features and the Dashboards have been really helpful in giving us an at-a-glance view of our assets. Just being able to see everything so transparently and going through it with a fine-tooth comb has helped us really clean up our assets. There are just so many options to customize and see things in different formats and really capture all the data that we need. And it's great that the [mobile] app is equally as functional as the web version.

My entire team is so excited to be able to have this real control and visibility of everything at a glance. We currently have 6 people using Asset Panda and we’re about to add 3 more who control our [non-asset] inventory. Inventory is not something that we had tracked previously, but now we’re going to track things like swag for recruiting events, student uniforms, and staff uniforms. Being able to track when those items are leaving storage and being notified when there’s a minimum quantity hit is going to be a game changer.

Working in a charter school, there’s a tight budget and we’re often working with certain kinds of constraints. I would really suggest Asset Panda as being the most cost-effective and robust software that you can get for that amount of money. For a small business, this is one huge step in the right direction for improving our systems going forward.

-Jackie Cline, Senior Accountant