IT Asset Management Basics: Inventory, Lifecycle, Licences and Warranties

Why bother

Try asking around your organization: how many laptops do we have? Which ones go out of warranty next month? Did the person who left last month return their machine? If the answer is "open three Excel files and call accounts", you're not alone. What we often see in Laos: equipment bought through several channels (bought in Vientiane, ordered from Thailand, supplied by a project), warranty cards in a drawer, and provincial branch equipment that nobody has counted in years.

IT asset management (ITAM) isn't a big project. It's a habit: register equipment when it arrives, update it when it moves, close it out when it leaves.

What to record

Start small. A field nobody updates is worse than no field.

On warranties: some equipment bought in Thailand is a Thai-market model whose warranty only applies in Thailand. Record it on the day it arrives, or you'll find out the day the mainboard dies.

Tagging

Use durable QR or barcode labels (polyester or tamper-evident), placed in the same spot on every device: under the laptop, on the side of the desktop, on the front or rack ear of rack equipment. Staff can scan them with a phone during the annual count. On dusty, hot mine and factory sites, plain paper labels peel off within a few months.

Lifecycle: from purchase to disposal

1. Request and approval: standardize on 2–3 laptop models. Spares and imaging get much easier.
2. Receiving: register and tag before handing over to the user. Not after.
3. Assignment: get a signed acknowledgement (in the system or on paper).
4. Repair and moves: update every time a device changes hands or branch.
5. Staff leaving: put the equipment return checklist into the HR exit process, alongside account closure.
6. Retirement: securely wipe or destroy drives and record it before selling or donating.

Planning lifespans we use: laptops 4–5 years, desktops 5–6 years, servers and switches per the vendor's support period, UPS batteries 3–5 years in an air-conditioned room and less in a hot one.

Retiring a device without leaking data

Disposal is where an asset register protects you most, and where steps get skipped. A short routine we recommend:

1. Back up and confirm with the user that nothing on the device is still needed.
2. Remove it from management: Intune or other MDM, antivirus console, domain, and any licences tied to it.
3. Wipe according to the drive type. For SSDs, simply deleting files or a quick format does not remove data; use the manufacturer's secure-erase tool or a cryptographic erase. If the drive was encrypted with BitLocker or FileVault from day one, destroying the key and resetting the device covers most cases. Drives that held finance or HR data, or that won't wipe, get physically destroyed.
4. Record it: date, method, who did it, and where the device went (sold, donated, scrapped).

Encrypting every laptop from the start makes step 3 fast, and also protects you when a laptop is lost in a taxi.

Software licences

Licences are where money leaks quietly.

• Subscriptions such as Microsoft 365: check monthly whether leavers' accounts still hold licences. Paid, unused licences are common.
• Perpetual and device licences: firewalls, antivirus and design software have subscription or support expiry dates. Put them in the same system with a 60-day reminder. Renewals and orders from Thailand take time.
• Unlicensed software: automated inventory will surface it. Better you find it than the vendor.

Dates that cost you when you miss them

An asset register earns its keep through expiry dates. These are the ones we see missed most often:

The last row matters right now. Windows 10 reached end of support in October 2025. Businesses can buy Extended Security Updates for at most three years, to October 2028, and the cost rises each year. Your register should show which Windows 10 PCs can move to Windows 11 (it needs TPM 2.0 and a supported processor) and which must be replaced, so you can spread that replacement over the next budget cycles instead of buying everything at once.

Tools: where to start

For organizations with 50–300 devices and a small IT team, we usually start with Snipe-IT for the asset register, or GLPI if you want a helpdesk at the same time. Pick one and actually use it. Two systems that disagree are worse than one.

The first count

Give it two weeks. Pull the purchasing records, the device list from your Microsoft 365 or Google admin console and a network scan, then physically walk every room. The three numbers won't match. The gaps are exactly what you're looking for.

A worked example: 120 devices on three sites

Say you have a head office in Vientiane and two provincial branches: 85 laptops and desktops, 20 printers and network devices, and 15 servers, NAS units, UPS units and firewalls.

• Tagging: about 5 minutes per device including the photo and serial number, so roughly 10 hours of work. One person, two days, plus travel to the branches.
• First reconciliation: expect 5–10% of devices to be missing, misassigned or unknown. That is normal, not a scandal.
• Licences: compare paid Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace seats with active staff. If you pay for 85 seats and 72 people are working, 13 licences are being paid every month for nobody.
• Running cost afterwards: one to two hours a month for one named person, plus a check whenever someone joins, moves or leaves.

The payoff usually shows up in the first renewal season: fewer surprise expiries, and a replacement plan you can defend in the budget meeting.

Mistakes we keep seeing

• Registering only new purchases, so older equipment never enters the system
• Recording a user's name but not the branch, so nobody can find the device when that person moves
• Treating the asset tag and the serial number as the same thing
• Leaving monitors, docking stations and UPS units out because they're "small"
• No owner: the register belongs to "IT", which means nobody updates it

What's different in Laos

• Several purchase channels. Equipment arrives from Vientiane shops, Thai distributors and donor or project budgets. Record the channel, because it decides where the warranty claim goes and how long a repair takes.
• Project equipment. Devices bought under a project often come with handover conditions. Note the project name and any handover date in the register so nobody disposes of something that isn't yet yours to dispose of.
• Names in three scripts. The same user may be typed in Lao, Thai or English across systems. Pick one convention for user and location fields, usually Latin script, or searches will miss records.
• Branches with weak internet. A hosted tool that needs a fast connection frustrates provincial staff. Phone scanning that works offline and syncs later, or a simple monthly upload, works better.

Send us whatever equipment list you have, however incomplete, and we'll help you structure the data and pick a tool that fits your size.