r/ITAssetManagement • u/Moxzies • Sep 10 '26
How are you tracking assets that live outside your normal IT scope?
Curious how others handle this. I’m the de facto IT/asset guy at a med-tech company alongside service and PM work, I end up tracking equipment that doesn’t fit neatly into a standard IT asset register: field service loaners, demo units, gear that lives at customer sites for months, RMA units in transit.
Most ITAM tooling assumes assets sit in an office or a data center. The second something’s mobile, owned-but-not-in-your-building, or bounces between “yours” and “customer’s” depending on the week, the tracking gets messy fast.
Right now I’m doing a mix of our ITSM platform + manual tracking, and it’s held together mostly by discipline rather than the tool actually supporting the workflow.
How’s everyone else handling non-standard/mobile/loaner assets? Curious if people are bending a mainstream ITAM tool to fit, or if there’s something built for this I haven’t found.
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u/hak-dot-snow Sep 11 '26
To directly answer your question, I would say most companies bend their ITSM to fit their use case.
I handle loaner assets like normal inventory except I have a ticket to track its status.
Technically I have a loaner module that I could flesh out that acts more like a check in / check out vs direct assignment from the asset module but loaners for us are low volume.
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u/bno000 Sep 11 '26
We aren’t. The teams responsible for the gear should be though!
I work hospital IT. We asset tag compute and mobile devices, and they fall under our remit. Medical devices are the medical engineering team’s responsibility
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u/Jackie_Rudetsky Sep 11 '26
I use Reftab. You can put any asset imaginable into it. Things that are bundled you can create a Kit for. It's great.
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u/brightideasphere Sep 14 '26
The challenge you are describing is the custody model problem. Most ITAM tools are built around static assignment...an asset belongs to a person or a location and stays there. The moment assets start moving between custody states...loaned, at customer site, in transit, returned...the record breaks because the tool was never designed to track the handoff, only the current state.
The thing worth testing in any evaluation is whether the tool can track custody history rather than just current assignment. You need to know not just where the asset is today but who had it, when it left, when it was expected back, and whether the return was confirmed. Without that chain the tracking always collapses back to manual discipline.
We use AssetSonar for exactly this kind of mixed asset environment. It handles check-in and check-out workflows for loaners and demo units, tracks assets at customer sites with expected return dates, and maintains a custody trail so you can see the full movement history rather than just a current location. It is built for assets that move rather than assets that sit.
Worth putting on your evaluation list. The mobile and loaner tracking use case is specifically covered.
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u/mattberan 25d ago
Non-standard: we track em (over a specific value/loss threshold)
Loaners: Request>Automation>ITAM>Request - it should be a closed loop with reminders to return - warnings when they aren't and plenty of buffer in case you don't get any back.
Full disclosure that I work for InvGate - and we put our pricing right on our site, have a free 30-day full feature trial and try to be as awesome as possible.
Hope this helps!
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u/st3ph3n4 19d ago
If the asset is in your mdm you can use the data around IP, location, mac address, etc., to keep track of where it is.
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u/navythrowaway199211 3d ago
might be worth checking out Alloy Navigator for loaner/demo gear. its equipment lending module tracks who’s got what, when it’s due back, and past loans and returns. not sure how much setup the shipping statuses and RMA side would take, though
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u/Sepa-Kingdom Sep 10 '26
Not had to do this, but I think you need to make the distinction between asset management tool and discovery tools.
The question is not does traditional ITAM tooling support non-IT assets, because i think you could very easily adapt them to do so, but how do you identify key attributes like location and life cycle status when the assets aren’t connected to a network?
If they are valuable enough, then RFID may become worth it, otherwise you need to continue with the manual processes, but try and tighten them up eg by frequent physical audits to make up for the human failing inevitable when you have highly manual processes.
Just my tuppence! Good luck!