An equipment register that says what is off the road

Most trade businesses have an equipment list. It was built for the depreciation schedule, it lists purchase dates and values, and nobody has opened it since.

The register the business actually needs answers a different question, which is what can go out on a job tomorrow and what cannot.

Four states, and only one of them is normal

An item is available, out with somebody, in for service, or retired. A register that only records what you own cannot tell the first two apart, and that is the difference between a van leaving on time and a van leaving late.

Keep the state on the item and it becomes the thing you filter by. What is out of service this week is a question with an answer rather than a walk around the yard.

Who has it matters more than where it lives

Equipment does not live anywhere. It moves between vans, sites and the workshop, and asking where something is gets you the last place somebody saw it.

Asking who has it gets you a person you can ring. Hold the holder on the item and the search for a missing meter takes one call instead of a morning.

Due dates are the reason the register exists

Calibration, servicing, registration and inspection all have dates, and all of them are invisible until they have passed. A register that holds the next due date turns that into a list you can read a month ahead.

In Diract you list your own testers, tools and vehicles with who has each, when each is next due for calibration or a service, and what is out of service. Once those dates are fields, what falls due next month is a filter, and it can sit on a dashboard somebody reads on a Monday.

Record the downtime, not just the repair

The repair bill is easy to see because it arrives as an invoice. The expensive part is the four days the item was unavailable, and that never appears anywhere.

Record the day something went out of service and the day it came back. After a year, the items that spend the most days off the road are obvious, and replacing one of those is a decision backed by a number rather than by frustration.

Hire tells you what to buy

Track what you hire and for how long. Where the same item is hired often enough, the hire spend against a year is the purchase argument, and it is usually more convincing than anyone expects.

The reverse is just as useful. Something you own and rarely use, that also needs a service every year, is often cheaper to hire when it is genuinely needed.

Tie items to the jobs they went out on

A link between an item and a job answers the awkward questions. Which jobs used the tester that turned out to be out of calibration, and which site the damaged item was on when it broke.

It also settles the ordinary ones. A customer asking what you used at their property should not need anybody to remember. A test and tag register you can actually search covers the same link from the testing side, where the consequences of not having it are sharpest.

What to do first

• Give every item a state: available, out, in for service, or retired
• Hold who has it, rather than where it is
• Put the next due date on the item and read the month ahead
• Record the days something is off the road, not just the repair cost
• Total a year of hire for anything you hire repeatedly
• Link items to jobs so the awkward question has a quick answer