Ask any trades business how many drills it owns and someone can answer. Ask how many batteries, and the room goes quiet. Packs outnumber the tools they power, they move between tools and people freely, and they get repurchased on autopilot whenever a crew is short - which makes them, pack for pack, one of the steadiest leaks of money in the kit budget. This guide is about plugging that leak without drowning in admin: deciding which packs deserve tracking, what to record, and an assignment model that ends the communal battery heap.
What you will learn
- Why packs disappear faster than tools
- Decide what is worth tracking
- What to record per pack
- Labelling packs and chargers
- Issue sets, not singles
- Tools that make this easier
- FAQ
Why packs disappear faster than tools
Batteries have every property that defeats casual tracking:
- They are anonymous. Twenty identical packs on a charging shelf are indistinguishable, so nobody can say one is missing - only that there “seem to be fewer”.
- They detach. A power tool comes back; its battery stays on a windowsill at the job. The tool register shows a clean return.
- They pool. A communal charger corner means every pack belongs to everyone, which in practice means no one. Shortages get solved by buying, not by finding.
- They die quietly. A fading pack gets shuffled to the back of the shelf rather than reported, so the count includes packs that have not done a day’s work in a year.
The pattern across all four: packs without identities cannot be missed, and stock that cannot be missed only ever shrinks.
Decide what is worth tracking
Not every pack deserves a record, and pretending otherwise is how tracking schemes die. Make the split deliberately:
- Track individually the packs where a single loss stings: high-capacity packs, packs for the big-platform tools, anything you would grumble about repurchasing. These get an ID, a label and an assignee.
- Manage as stock the small, cheap packs: count what you hold, set a reorder point, and stop caring which specific unit is which.
- Chargers always get tracked. They are the bottleneck of the whole system - a crew with packs and no charger is a crew on the merchant’s forecourt by 9 am.
A simple purchase-price threshold makes the rule easy to apply and easy to defend when someone asks why their compact pack has no label.
What to record per pack
For the packs above your threshold, the record is short but specific:
| Field | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Asset ID | Turns one of twenty identical packs into a specific, missable object |
| Platform + voltage | Packs are not interchangeable across brands; this says what it fits |
| Capacity (Ah) | The 12 Ah pack and the 2 Ah pack are different losses in the same housing |
| Serial or date code | Manufacturer warranty claims run on it, and it ages the pack |
| Purchase date + price | Shows the real annual battery spend, which is the number that motivates all of this |
| Status | In service, on charge as spare, retired, awaiting recycling |
| Assignee | The person whose set it belongs to - the field that ends the communal heap |
| Condition notes | Runtime complaints, drops, swelling - the early warnings worth writing down |
Labelling packs and chargers
A battery is a hostile place for a label, so placement does most of the work:
- Use a flat outer face of the housing - clear of the contacts, the release buttons, the fuel-gauge window and the rails the charger and tool slide along.
- Choose durable laminated stock. Packs get dropped in mortar dust, rained on and thrown into vans; paper labels last a fortnight.
- A QR code earns its keep here. Scanned with an ordinary phone camera, it tells whoever is holding the pack whose set it is and where it should live - which is exactly the question a stray pack on a windowsill raises.
- Chargers get the same treatment, plus the assignee’s name in large print if you want the polite-but-firm effect on shared sites.
Tip: label new packs the day they arrive, before they reach the charging shelf. Once a pack has joined the anonymous heap it is part of the problem; a labelling backlog never gets shorter on its own.
Issue sets, not singles
The model that works is the one you already use for tools: issue each worker a defined battery set - say, their packs plus a charger - recorded against their name, with a return and a quick condition report when kit is handed back or renewed. Spare and seasonal packs sit in a small shared pool run on a lending-library model: borrow against your name, bring it back, and overdue packs show up on a list instead of in next month’s invoice.
Two habits keep the system alive. First, treat the assignee field as the answer to every stray pack - scan it, see whose it is, hand it back. Second, make shortage a request, not a self-service raid on the shelf; the requests tell you when the fleet genuinely needs to grow.
Tools that make this easier
A spreadsheet can list packs, but batteries expose its weakness brutally: the events that matter - a pack borrowed from the pool, a stray returned, a fading pack flagged - happen at a shelf or in a van, and nobody walks back to a laptop to log them. The sheet stays tidy and wrong.
AMPthilly is built for exactly this shape of problem. Each tracked pack gets a profile with platform, capacity and purchase details (custom fields cover the rest); printable QR labels in batch make the initial labelling session painless; scanning a label with a phone camera opens the pack’s record in the browser, where you can check it in or out or report a fault on the spot; and assignments, returns and the overdue list run themselves. Cheap packs can live alongside as consumable stock with reorder points. The free plan - 3 users, 25 assets - is enough to pilot the over-the-threshold packs before spending anything; pricing covers the rest.
FAQ
How do you keep track of power tool batteries? Label the packs worth tracking, record platform, capacity and purchase details, and assign packs to named workers. Identity plus assignee is what makes a missing pack missable.
Should every battery be labelled individually? Every pack you track individually, yes - flat face of the housing, clear of contacts and rails, durable stock. Below your value threshold, manage packs as counted stock instead.
Are tool batteries assets or consumables? Split them by a price threshold: big packs are assets with records and assignees; small packs are stock with a reorder point.
How should batteries be assigned to workers? As a defined set per person - packs plus charger - recorded like any other kit issue, checked at offboarding, with a small shared pool for spares.
When should a tool battery be retired? When runtime fails the work, the pack will not hold charge, or it shows swelling or damage. Mark it retired with a reason and route it to battery recycling.
The takeaway
Battery loss is not dramatic; it is a slow tax paid through the merchant’s till. Decide which packs are assets, give those an identity and an owner, run spares as a borrow-and-return pool, and retire fading packs on the record instead of the back of the shelf. The day every pack has a name on it is the day the autopilot repurchasing stops.