I'm responsible for purchasing our computer equipment for our startup. Every time I make a purchase on our company (@MakeSpace) credit card, I have to remember to send an email to our accountants (record the purchase as an asset, depreciation for taxes, etc).
More importantly, it's hard to keep track of what equipment was given to each employee. I imagine at a larger company this would be handled by an IT department, but sub 50 people I'm doing this on a spreadsheet myself. Would love a simple web app to record serial # of machine, receipt (that I could upload PDF), date purchased, employee, etc.
Happily would pay monthly SaaS. Please message me if anyone knows of this type of product. I'd happily be your first customer if you want to build it.
At Silk, we dogfood our own product for this purpose, as part of our internal knowledge base site. Here's a step-by-step for setting it up:
Register for an account.
Follow the little tutorial balloons to create your first collection: "Employees." Create some basic employee pages.
Create another collection, "Equipment," with pages named after serial numbers, and add some facts: perhaps "Used By," "Purchase Date," and "Type."
This will probably take no more than a couple of minutes. What you get is a wiki-like site with permissions; an easy way to create and present charts, distributions, overviews, etc; and a newsfeed showing fact changes, like "Owner changed to X from Y."
Once you see how the product works, you can upload your existing data as CSV. You will need to upload existing receipts by hand, or use our API (we can help you with this).
Example queries that you can build trivially with the "explore" view, and then store on a page or embed:
- Equipment with "Used By" nonempty, grouped by memory amount
- Table of equipment with owner, price, date purchased
- Pie chart of equipment's memory size distribution
Check out https://www.silk.co/teams and write an email if you want some help setting it up. Or send me a message.
Someone can sell/make you a tool for that however you can also do it yourself with a simple Google Docs spreadsheet. Your accountant will understand it as will anyone else that has to maintain it. You get versioning built in so you can see who has changed what. Plus you can make it read only.
Regarding the receipts, have a folder and just give the receipts a simple date-supplier-what-for filename. You could probably paste the hyperlinks into your spreadsheet if you could be bothered. If you can't then they are easy enough to find.
I'd like it if the buyer could add a note to credit card purchases - that show up in the monthly bill. PO number is the most obvious thing to add. But for your typical customer you might also want to add "lunch with mom" or anything.
Most of the enterprise applications that do inventory management (Spiceworks, Altiris, etc.) have clients that run on your network that can poll the hardware for detailed specifics. They track the logged-on user, the serial number, the BIOS date, etc. Obviously some do this better than others (I have yet to see one that does networked printers, projectors, smart TVs, etc).
What would you pay for this service, annually? What are the features you would find most useful?
Forward an email receipt to yourcompanyA87y5@trackmyreceipts.com and have it auto-create a purchase record
Upload a PDF invoice or receipt
Manually create a purchase
Track purchase orders
Enter serial numbers
Track depreciation
Produce reports of in-service equipment
Enter a comment about deployed location (e.g. John Smith, or Board Room)
Track service history?
Inventory management is a big topic. It sounds like you want a niche product, or that you perhaps need to look at some of the players in the space.
There's a clear gap in my mind between enterprise and SMB. I don't need the features of a Spiceworks (yet). Look at what Resumator did (big space but found the 'niche' to allow the CEO/COO to act like head of HR).
All the Features you mentioned, plus multi user access (for bookkeeper / accountants).
I'd pay $3-500 annually (maybe do something like $X per device > 5 devices).
More importantly, it's hard to keep track of what equipment was given to each employee. I imagine at a larger company this would be handled by an IT department, but sub 50 people I'm doing this on a spreadsheet myself. Would love a simple web app to record serial # of machine, receipt (that I could upload PDF), date purchased, employee, etc.
Happily would pay monthly SaaS. Please message me if anyone knows of this type of product. I'd happily be your first customer if you want to build it.
edit: Happy Easter!