**Track custody by recording three facts at the moment of handover: who took the
item, when, and when it came back.** That is enough to settle almost every
equipment dispute, because most disputes are about sequence rather than intent.
Nobody records custody while everything is fine. It gets recorded after the first
argument, which is usually about a laptop, occasionally about a vehicle, and
always about something that left with somebody who no longer works there.
The awkward part is that everybody was sure they knew. Custody is one of those
facts that feels obvious right up until two people are equally certain and both
of them are wrong.
Why equipment actually goes missing
It is rarely theft. In practice, four ordinary routes account for most of it.
Somebody left and nobody asked. Their manager assumed IT would collect it. IT
assumed the manager had. The laptop is at their house, and after three months
nobody wants to make the phone call.
It moved between sites. A printer went to the branch that needed it more.
That was the right decision, and no record was made, so it is now missing from
one register and unknown to the other.
It was lent for an afternoon. Six weeks ago.
It broke and went for repair. The repair shop still has it. Nobody remembers
which repair shop.
None of these are dishonest. They are all simply undocumented, and undocumented
becomes lost at about the six month mark.
What a custody record has to contain
Less than people expect. A useful trail answers three questions:
That is the whole thing. "It went to Sara in March and came back in June, then to
Layla in July" ends most conversations without anybody being accused of anything.
What makes it work is timing. The record has to be created at the moment of
handover, not reconstructed afterwards. A trail written from memory in December
is a guess with timestamps on it, and everybody in the room knows it.
This is why the recording step has to be faster than not recording it. If
assigning an asset takes longer than sending a message saying "I've given Sara
the MacBook", people will send the message instead, and the message is not a
record.
Assigning without maintaining a second directory
Assign an asset to a person and the handover is recorded for you.
The people available are the same People records the rest of the workspace uses,
so you are not maintaining a separate list of staff for the asset system. Their
name appears on the asset rather than a free-text field somebody typed
differently the third time, which matters more than it sounds: "S. Ahmed", "Sara
A" and "sara ahmed" are three people to a spreadsheet and one person to a
database.
The trail stays with the asset for its whole life. Deleting an asset in Wurxa
keeps its tag and its history and can be restored. That is deliberate. The record
of who had a thing is often needed after somebody decided the thing itself no
longer matters.
The offboarding case, which is the real one
The reason to keep custody records is not the argument. It is the leaver.
When somebody resigns, the question "what do they have" should take five seconds,
not an email thread and a guess. In Wurxa the assets a person holds appear on
their employee profile, alongside everything else about them, so the return list
is written before anybody asks for it.
That single view is what turns offboarding from a chase into a checklist.
It is also the moment most companies discover their register was wrong, which is
an uncomfortable but useful thing to learn while the person is still answering
their phone. A register that is only ever consulted after somebody has left is a
register that is only ever wrong when it matters.
The rule about checking things back in
Check-in and check-out are never blocked in Wurxa, on any plan, whatever your
capacity or billing state.
That is a deliberate rule rather than an oversight. A company should never be
prevented from recording that a laptop came back because of something to do with
a subscription. Capacity limits, where they apply at all, apply to creating new
assets. Resolving the ones you already have is always open.
Where to start
You do not need a complete register to benefit, and waiting for one is why many
companies never start at all.
Assign the twenty items that would actually hurt to lose. The laptops, the
vehicles, the things with a serial number and a resale value. Let the rest arrive
as they are handled, because an asset gets recorded most reliably at the moment
somebody is already thinking about it.
The value shows up on the first handover, not on the day the register is
complete.
One habit makes the difference between a register that stays true and one that
decays: record the handover while the person is standing there. Not that
afternoon, not at the end of the week. The thirty seconds it takes at the desk is
the entire difference, because a handover recorded later is a handover recorded
from memory, and memory is what you were trying to replace.
Where custody breaks down across sites
Single-site companies rarely lose things. The failure is a multi-site failure,
and it has a specific shape.
Equipment moves between branches for good reasons: a terminal is needed more
urgently somewhere else, a vehicle is reassigned, a spare monitor fills a gap.
The move is operationally correct and administratively invisible, because the
person carrying the box is not the person who maintains the register.
Two things help. Record the site on the asset, not only in someone's memory,
so a move is a change rather than a disappearance. And **audit per site rather
than per company**, because an audit of every location at once cannot be walked
in a single pass, and everything you did not reach gets recorded as missing.
The second point catches people out. Narrowing an audit to one site is what makes
it finishable, and a finished audit is the only kind that tells you anything.
Put the workflow into practice.
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