TWO hours to go before your all-important presentation. You’ve been up all night fine-tuning the graphics and the punchy bullet points. You go into the office to pick up the digital projector – over which you agonized for six months before buying – and its not there!

Your marketing manager says she took it to a conference on Monday and gave it to your sales rep on Tuesday, who took it home as he was traveling to Durban for a business meeting on Wednesday. He says he put it on the administrator’s desk on Thursday and told her to put it away.

The administrator says she hasn’t seen it. Enough already. You can see you have a problem: tracking and controlling your assets.

Portable equipment like laptop computers, digital projectors, cameras and cellular phones have become vital in many small businesses – because they make you more efficient when you’re out of your office, running around after customers and prospective business.

But how do you keep track of this equipment and protect it from theft and damage, and also make sure that your staff do the same? Here are some guidelines.

Know what you’ve got

Start with the basics: make a list of what valuable equipment you’ve got, and update the list every time you make a new acquisition.

This could apply to all equipment, not just the high-risk items that are regularly used outside the office. On that list, include the following information on each item:

•The make and description

•The serial number

•The purchase price, place and date of purchase

•Where it is kept in the office

•Who is responsible for it

This is good to have anyway – both for your financial records and for insurance purposes.

Know where it is, and where it’s gone

Allocate a secure place for the item in the office. A steel cabinet that locks might be good enough for some items, but consider buying a proper safe for your really expensive stuff.

Then make up a simple form for each piece of equipment – to be filled in and signed when that item is taken out of the office. Get the person borrowing it to fill in where it is going and when it will be back.


Ensuring a common understanding among employees around assets

To make sure your business's electronic equipment is protected against theft and damage, it is important to put down some ground rules about how users must ensure the safety of the equipment, and what the consequences are if things go missing or are damaged.

You are unlikely to get away with insisting that staff replace what they lose. Some electronic devices could cost someone a salary for a few months, so any wise employee would simply not use the equipment!

It would be more reasonable to insist that employees be responsible for the cost of the insurance ‘excess before insurance’ – where the insurance company requires you to pay the first few hundred rand or so of any replacement.

Most important, however, is to have a policy in place and to make employees aware of how they are expected to look after the equipment.

Critical rules

Here are some crucial rules that should be followed and habits that they should develop:

•When travelling in acar, keep your equipment in your boot – not inside the cab.

•When you park the car, take the equipment inside with you.

When staying in a hotel, ask the hotel to look after your equipment in their hotel safe when you have to leave the hotel without it.

•When using equipment like a laptop at a presentation, don’t let it out of your sight – even if it is on the podium. Laptops have been known to disappear from conference podiums while speakers step down to network with the audience after a talk, so you can’t be too careful.

•Avoid using a flashy, expensivelooking carrier bag, as this will attract attention of the discerning thief. An inconspicuous laptop is a safer laptop.

Drum it in

Awareness and good habits are really the only way that your equipment will be well-controlled and looked after. Remember your job as the business owner, is also to be a good educator.

What helps is to:

•Write out the policy about how to staff should check equipment out of the office, and how they should look after it – and ask each staff member to read it a sign a copy.

•Summarise the policy in point form, print it out and put it up somewhere prominent so everyone can see it regularly.

•Make a list of all the good habits outlined above, and put it with the piece of equipment – so that each person borrowing the equipment will be reminded.

•It would be a good idea to put a sheet of these good habits inside the laptop case where it can’t be missed.

Only in this way, can you expect your employees to be really concerned about your business’s electronic equipment, and to look after it like you would.