No one has ever stolen an office charger; thousands of people have borrowed one indefinitely, which costs exactly the same. Chargers and cables sit in an awkward spot for asset tracking - each item is too cheap to register the way you would a laptop, but the aggregate replacement spend is real money, and the disruption when the drawer is empty is out of all proportion to the price of what should be in it. The answer is not to track everything or nothing, but to split the problem in two.
What you will learn
- Two kinds of cable: track it or stock it
- What to record for tracked chargers
- Labelling something that gets coiled and crushed
- The borrow drawer, formalised
- Commodity cables: count, don’t name
- Tools that make this easier
- FAQ
Two kinds of cable: track it or stock it
The first decision is sorting your cable population into two piles:
- Track individually: anything you would chase a leaver for. Laptop power adapters, high-wattage USB-C chargers, specialist or proprietary adapters, anything bought for a specific person or machine. These get an asset ID, a label and an owner.
- Stock and count: the commodity layer. HDMI leads, patch cables, standard phone cables, generic USB-C. These get a labelled bin, a count and a reorder point - no names, no individual IDs.
Both failure modes come from skipping this sort. Register every patch cable individually and the admin kills the register; track nothing and the drawer becomes a slow leak that only shows up as a recurring line on the purchasing card.
What to record for tracked chargers
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Asset ID | Short and printable - it has to fit on a cable flag |
| Type, wattage, connector | A 45 W charger on a 90 W laptop is a slow death and a support ticket |
| Compatible devices | Which machines it pairs with, so the right spare goes out the door |
| Bundled with | The laptop kit it was issued alongside, so it returns with it |
| Cost | The number that justifies - or kills - individual tracking for this item |
| Status and holder | In drawer, issued, on loan, overdue |
“Bundled with” is the field that makes charger tracking cheap. A charger that lives on its laptop’s record is tracked by the laptop’s own checkout and return - no separate ceremony required.
Labelling something that gets coiled and crushed
Chargers are hostile territory for labels: coiled daily, crushed in bags, warmed in use. What works:
- Wrap-around flag labels on the cable, a few centimetres from the brick - the flag survives coiling that would peel a flat label off the wire.
- A small label on the brick’s flat face as the second copy, since flags do eventually tear off.
- Label both halves of detachable chargers. When the cable separates from the brick, an unlabelled half is a future orphan - the office drawer is full of them.
- “Return to IT” on every loaner, printed beside the asset ID. Most chargers come back the moment the label asks.
- Colour bands by wattage or standard. A strip of coloured tape sorts the 65 W from the 100 W across a crowded desk faster than any printed text.
The same flag-label approach covers display cables for monitors and docks, where the cable is the part that wanders.
The borrow drawer, formalised
Tracked chargers move through two distinct flows, and naming them is half the system. Issued chargers go out at onboarding, bundled into the laptop checkout, open-ended, returned at offboarding with the rest of the kit. Loaned chargers serve the forgot-mine-today crowd from a small pool, checked out by name with a due date measured in days. The loan must be effortless to record or it will not be recorded - a QR label scanned with a phone camera, a name, done. Then the weekly glance at the overdue list does the chasing: a loaner three days late is at someone’s desk; one nobody chased for a quarter has joined a home office permanently.
Tip: size the loaner pool deliberately small and visible - a wall pouch with five numbered slots beats a deep drawer with fifteen anonymous bricks. Empty slots create their own pressure to return things; deep drawers absorb losses silently.
Commodity cables: count, don't name
For the stock pile, the discipline is purchasing, not assignment. Give each cable type one labelled bin, set a target stock level and a reorder point, and reorder when the count hits the trigger - not when the bin is empty and three people are waiting. The reorder point converts cable management from a recurring emergency into a purchasing rhythm, and the drain rate per bin tells you something useful too: an office that empties its HDMI bin monthly has a borrowing culture (or a labelling gap in its meeting rooms) worth a closer look.
Tools that make this easier
Spreadsheets fail here for a blunt reason: the transaction is smaller than the admin. Nobody opens a workbook to log a borrowed charger, so the sheet captures purchases and nothing else - the usual spreadsheet decay, accelerated to weeks.
AMPthilly handles both halves of the split in one register. Tracked chargers are physical assets with QR labels, checked out by scanning with a phone camera - individually for loaners, or bundled into a bulk checkout with the laptop and the rest of the onboarding kit. Commodity cables are consumable stock with target levels and reorder points, so the reorder point tells you when to restock instead of the empty-drawer email. Every loan and return lands in the audit history, and the overdue list replaces the chasing. The free plan covers 3 users and 25 assets - enough to formalise a loaner pool this week.
FAQ
Is it worth tracking chargers and cables individually? Only the ones you would chase a leaver for - laptop chargers, high-wattage and specialist adapters. Commodity cables are counted stock with a reorder point.
How do I stop laptop chargers from disappearing? One issued charger per person inside the laptop kit, plus a small loaner pool lent with same-week due dates. The due date does the work.
How do you label a charger? Wrap-around flag on the cable near the brick, a small label on the brick, both halves if they detach, and “Return to IT” on loaners.
Should chargers be checked out with the laptop? Yes - bundle them into one checkout so the kit issues and returns as a unit.
How many spare cables should the office keep? Set target stock and a reorder point per type from your own drain rate, and reorder at the trigger rather than at empty.
The takeaway
Chargers and cables stop being a leak when you split them honestly: a small set of named, labelled, owner-attached chargers that travel with their laptops, and an anonymous commodity layer managed by counts and reorder points. Neither half takes much effort - it is the unsorted middle, where everything is sort of tracked and nothing actually is, that quietly eats the budget.