Nobody knows how many desks the company owns until the week of an office move - and by then it is too late to find out cheaply. Furniture is the asset class everyone walks past: too bulky to steal, too boring to audit, and so it migrates between floors, gets “borrowed” into meeting rooms, follows hybrid workers home, and quietly halves in count between one office and the next. This guide sets up a furniture register that survives exactly those events.
What you will learn
- Where the desks actually go
- What to record, and what not to bother with
- Labelling desks, chairs and storage
- Rooms, not people
- Surviving moves and stocktakes
- Tools that make this easier
- FAQ
Where the desks actually go
Furniture does not disappear; it relocates without telling anyone.
- Internal migration. A chair rolls two desks over, a monitor arm follows a team to another floor, and six months later the register describes a seating plan that no longer exists.
- Refits and moves. The single biggest destroyer of furniture records. Items get binned, sold, stored or left behind, and none of it is written down because everyone is busy moving.
- Home working. Chairs and desks issued for home offices are company assets in employees’ houses - with no record, no return date, and no line on the offboarding checklist.
- Storage amnesia. Spare furniture goes into a basement or unit “temporarily”, and the company re-buys what it already owns because nobody can say what is down there.
The pattern: furniture records fail at location changes, so the register has to be built around recording location changes.
What to record, and what not to bother with
First decide the threshold. Anything you would insure, move between offices, or repurchase if it vanished gets its own ID - desks, task chairs, sit-stand frames, storage units, meeting tables, soft seating. Identical low-value items can be tracked as counted quantities per room instead, closer to how you would handle office supplies.
For each tracked item:
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Asset ID | The label’s number - the difference between “a grey chair” and FUR-0118 |
| Type and description | Desk, task chair, pedestal, meeting table - the unit of counting |
| Make, model or range | Matching parts and re-ordering the same range years later |
| Location: site, floor, room | The single most useful furniture field - and the one that goes stale |
| Assigned to | A department or room owner; a named person only for home-office kit |
| Purchase date and price | Insurance claims, depreciation and refit budgeting |
| Condition and photo | Settles “was it already broken?” at move time and end of lease |
A photo per item type costs minutes and pays off twice: identifying the exact range when extending a fit-out, and evidencing condition when handing back a leased office.
Labelling desks, chairs and storage
Furniture labels live a hard life - cleaning sprays, knees, vacuum cleaners - so placement is most of the craft:
- Desks: underside of the desktop, near a corner where a phone can reach it without crawling.
- Chairs: under the seat pan, never on fabric or gas lift.
- Cabinets and pedestals: inside the door or on the back panel near the top.
- Meeting tables and soft seating: underside of the frame, same corner convention every time.
Pick one convention per furniture type and label every item the same way, so a stocktake is a sweep of known spots rather than a hunt. QR labels earn their keep here: scanning with a phone camera pulls up the item’s record on the spot, which is the only realistic way anyone updates a location while standing in a meeting room.
Tip: label spare furniture in storage first. It is the furniture most likely to be forgotten, double-bought or lost in a move - and it is the easiest afternoon of labelling you will ever do, because none of it is under anyone.
Rooms, not people
Most assets are best assigned to people; furniture is the exception. Desks and chairs outlast any seating plan, so assign them to locations and departments, and let people change around them. The register then answers the questions that actually come up: what is in room 2.04, what does floor 3 hold, what is in storage.
Home-office furniture inverts the rule. The moment a chair leaves the building, treat it like a laptop: check it out to the named employee with the date, and let the open-checkouts list feed the offboarding checklist. The leaver’s chair is recoverable when it is a line on a list, and a write-off when it is a rumour.
Surviving moves and stocktakes
A furniture register proves itself on three occasions:
- Before a move: walk every room and reconcile - scan labels, fix locations, mark disposals. The output is a room-by-room manifest the movers and the new floor plan can both work from.
- After the move: sweep the new rooms and confirm arrivals. Anything unaccounted for is chased that week, while the old office and the moving company are still answerable.
- Annually in between: one floor-walk a year keeps drift small enough that move-time reconciliation stays an afternoon, not a forensic project. This is classic inventory management discipline applied to things with legs.
Tools that make this easier
Spreadsheets handle the first furniture count fine and then rot, because location changes happen in rooms and basements where nobody has the sheet open - the columns stay, the truth leaves. The longer version of that argument is in why Excel fails for asset tracking.
AMPthilly keeps the register where the furniture is: each item has a profile with location, owner, purchase details, photos and condition notes; printable QR labels in batch make the initial labelling project quick; scanning a label with a phone camera opens the record in the browser to fix a location or report damage on the spot; and every move and edit lands in the audit history. The free plan - 3 users, 25 assets, no card - covers a meeting-room floor or a storage unit as a pilot.
FAQ
How do you keep track of office furniture? Unique IDs and durable labels on anything worth replacing, one register with floor-and-room locations, and a habit of updating location at every move and refit.
Should you put asset tags on office furniture? Yes - durable labels in consistent protected spots (desk underside, seat pan, inside cabinet doors). QR labels make stocktakes and move days much faster.
How do you inventory office furniture before a move? Label first, then count room by room and fix the register before anything lifts. The room-level snapshot becomes the movers’ manifest and the arrival checklist.
Do you assign furniture to people or to rooms? Rooms and departments for everything that stays in the building; named-person checkouts for home-office furniture so it returns at offboarding.
Is it worth tracking inexpensive office furniture? Not individually. Set a threshold, track cheap identical items as quantities per room, and keep the register small enough that it actually gets maintained.
The takeaway
Furniture records fail at location changes, so build the register around them: a sensible threshold, labels in consistent hidden spots, locations down to the room, named checkouts for anything that goes home, and a reconciliation walk before and after every move. Do that and the next office move starts with a manifest instead of an argument about how many desks you own.