Finance and operations finally agree on who holds what
An employee assignment became a stock move, so custody, location and book value resolve from one record.
The problem a client brought us
“Finance has a depreciation schedule. Operations has a spreadsheet of who's holding which laptop. Neither one knows the other exists — and the numbers never match at count time.”
Before and after
Three records that never met
- Depreciation schedule
- Custody spreadsheet
- Warehouse location
One record everything resolves from
A stock move per assignment
What we found and built
We made an employee assignment a stock move, not a text field. Assigning an asset physically moves it into a virtual location named for that employee — so location, custody, and book value all resolve from the same record instead of three disconnected ones.
- Three depreciation methods, full service lifecycle (In Service → Faulty → Under Repair → Scrapped)
- Auto-created on purchase receipt at actual PO cost, so nothing gets registered twice
Result
First physical count that matched the book value on the first attempt.
The pattern behind it
One definition everyone calls
When several parts of a system each decide the same fact, they eventually disagree. We don't add a fourth opinion — we collapse the disagreement into one definition and make everything else read from it.
How we think about problemsRecognise any of this?
Most of our work starts with a message that sounds a lot like this one did.