The first ten laptops at a startup are easy - a founder bought them and can point at where each one sits. Somewhere around employee fifteen, with a few of them remote, “what hardware do we own” becomes an archaeology exercise through old order confirmations. Nothing broke; the company just outgrew the founder’s memory. This guide covers how growing software teams keep devices, peripherals, and licenses on the books with close to zero process.
What you will learn
- How device tracking breaks at a startup
- What belongs in the register
- Onboarding and offboarding are the whole game
- Remote kit: the record is your only line of sight
- Getting started in an afternoon
- Where AMPthilly fits
- FAQ
How device tracking breaks at a startup
Startups lose track of hardware for reasons that are mostly virtues - speed, trust, and an allergy to process:
- Buying outruns recording. Five hires in a month means five laptops from three suppliers, and nobody logged a serial number.
- Remote means invisible. Kit ships straight from the supplier to a flat you will never visit. Not recorded at order time means never recorded.
- Nobody owns the list. The office manager, a founder, whoever ordered last - ownership is ambiguous, so updates depend on mood.
- BYOD blurs the edges. When personal and company devices mix (BYOD), the register is what says which laptop the company may ask back.
- MDM is not an inventory. An MDM sees enrolled laptops - not the monitor, the dock, the spare in the cupboard, or who has the conference camera.
| Stage | What usually exists | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|
| First hires | A note in the order email | Serials never recorded |
| Roughly 10-25 people | A spreadsheet someone owns | Goes stale the week its owner is busy |
| 25-75 people | Spreadsheet plus MDM | MDM misses peripherals, spares, and licenses |
| 75 and up | A dedicated register | Habit, not tooling, becomes the constraint |
What belongs in the register
- Laptops - serial, model, purchase date and price, warranty end, current holder. The core of the register.
- Monitors and docks - the second-most expensive kit and the most often forgotten at offboarding.
- Peripherals as kits - webcams, chargers and cables, keyboards, and mice bundle into a starter kit per person rather than per-item records.
- External drives - cheap hardware, expensive contents. Worth tracking purely for the offboarding question “where is the drive”.
- Conference room equipment - assigned to the room, not a person, so it stops walking.
- Software licenses and seats - in the same register, so one offboarding pass catches the laptop and the paid seat.
A field-by-field rundown is in the IT asset inventory checklist.
Onboarding and offboarding are the whole game
At a software company, devices change hands almost exclusively when someone joins or leaves. Get those two moments right and the register stays true by itself:
- Onboarding: issue a standard kit - laptop, monitor, dock, peripherals - as one bundled checkout. The kit list doubles as the procurement checklist for the next hire.
- Offboarding: the list of everything assigned to the leaver is the recovery checklist. Work it before the last day, not after - the offboarding hardware recovery guide covers the sequencing.
Tip: record the serial number from the order confirmation before the laptop ships. It is the one moment the serial is in front of you in text form - after that, someone has to flip the laptop over and squint.
Remote kit: the record is your only line of sight
For a distributed team, the asset record is the only thing that knows where the company’s hardware is:
- Assign every shipped item to the employee at dispatch, with the delivery address on the record.
- Keep condition photos from returns; a returned laptop’s state decides whether it is reissued, repaired, or retired.
- Hold returned spares as a small pool, checked out again as needed.
- For replacements, swap the assignment when the new device ships - the old one stays the employee’s responsibility until it is scanned back in.
Getting started in an afternoon
- Pull the paper trail. Order confirmations and supplier invoices reconstruct most of the fleet, serials included.
- Reconcile against people. Ask everyone to confirm what they hold - a one-question form does it.
- Label what passes through the office. QR labels on laptops, monitors, and shared kit; remote devices get labelled at their next visit or swap.
- Assign everything to a person, room, or shelf. No anonymous devices, including the spares drawer.
- Wire the register into joiners and leavers. Those two checklists are the entire maintenance plan.
Where AMPthilly fits
AMPthilly keeps hardware, software licenses, and consumables in one register - the shape of a startup’s problem. Onboarding and offboarding run from reusable templates: a starter kit goes out as one bulk checkout, and a leaver’s gear transfers to a replacement in one step with history intact. CSV import pulls the fleet in from the spreadsheet you already have, and SSO (Google and Microsoft) plus MFA are included on every plan. The free plan covers 3 users and 25 assets, no card required - about a seed-stage fleet; see pricing when you outgrow it.
FAQ
How do startups keep track of laptops and equipment? One row per device with serial, holder, and location, updated at onboarding and offboarding - the two moments devices reliably change hands.
How do you track laptops for remote employees? Record the serial before shipping, assign the device to the employee with the delivery address, and recover with prepaid labels and condition photos.
When should a startup move off the spreadsheet? When the sheet’s owner leaves, the first unrecorded remote shipment, or the first offboarding you cannot list - usually well before fifty people.
How do you get equipment back when someone leaves? Start from their assignment list, send the return label before the last day, and check each item back in with condition noted.
Should software licenses be tracked with hardware? Yes - one register and one offboarding checklist covers the laptop and the paid seat in the same pass.
The takeaway
A startup does not need asset management process; it needs two good habits at the two moments hardware moves. Record the serial at order time, assign everything to a person from day one, and run joiners and leavers from the register - the free tier of a tool like AMPthilly costs nothing to try - and the company never faces the painful full-fleet reconstruction that teams who waited are doing right now.