Written By: Christopher Clark
4 EFFECTIVE WAYS IN BUSINESS ASSET MANAGEMENT
This year’s COVID-19 pandemic has caused an economic downturn for most businesses. Getting your business continuity plans regularly assessed and improved can help you thrive in situations like this.
One area of your business that needs attention is your asset management. Here are the four practical ways of managing your business assets:
1. Identify and track your assets periodically
Have you bought the latest MacBook Air 2020? Is your antivirus up to date? You don’t need to ask these if you have a business asset inventory in place.
According to business analysts, five risk factors contribute to an organisation’s failure to manage assets optimally. These risk factors are lack of knowledge about your purchases, over or under maintenance, improper operation, improper risk management, and sub-optimized asset management systems.
Keeping an accurate inventory of all your tangible business assets is your baseline in streamlining your whole asset management process. Without asset tracking, you may be blindly harbouring ghost assets or those that you think are still present and functioning but are actually lost, stolen, or unusable.
Business Loan Expert, Shane Perry from Max Funding says, “Your inventory can also be used to assess your business standing if you want to apply for a business loan in the future. An updated inventory helps more in the process. In most cases, banks and other lenders tend to require more time to process loans.
2. Know their value and depreciation
Having a complete list of your assets will now help you assign value to each of them. The current value of your assets may not be the same back when you purchased them. For instance, Investopedia said that a car loses 20% value in the first year and 40% after five years.
Outdated and unusable assets can slow down your operations. Therefore, it is equally important to track each of your asset’s depreciation to determine which assets need replacement, repair, or disposal.
3. Use an automated asset management tool
Manual management of assets can be both costly and time-consuming. To optimise operations, investing in a business asset management tool will give you accurate results faster and in a more cost-efficient manner.
Asset management tools can address the five most common asset management issues, which include human error, technical difficulties, inventory confusion, and resource wastage.
Asset management automation is becoming a trend as it reduces expense, enhances revenue, and smoothens day to day operations. In fact, it is forecasted that the global fixed asset management market would grow from 3 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 to 5.2 billion U.S. dollars in 2024.
4. Insure your assets
Accidents and untoward events can happen at any time. That’s why it is essential to protect your assets with appropriate insurance policies. When your assets are destroyed due to acts of nature such as fire and flood, business asset insurance can prevent substantial financial loss.
Knowing, tracking, and protecting your assets give you control over substantial parts of your business. Streamlining your process will let you know what to do the next time you purchase.
Track your assets, protect your business, and implement a strategic, proactive and long-term asset life cycle management with the help of LUP Global. Contact us now to discuss how to maximise assets and reduce waste for more sustainable development.