On any regular day, professionals at educational institutions have more than enough work to keep them busy. Administrators must manage budgets and financial goals, outline policies and procedures, and help set up educational missions and standards. Teachers, in addition to educating students in the classroom, must also grade papers and exams, keep their classroom supplies stocked, and prepare for future lessons and meetings.

Unfortunately, all of these tasks and more means leadership at most K-12 and higher education establishments are too busy to properly keep track of one of a school’s most important concerns: its assets.

Every year, educational institutions lose thousands to millions of dollars per establishment simply because they are not accurately tracking and measuring their assets, such as classroom supplies, computers, and sports and music equipment. In fact, estimates from lost and “ghost” (a.k.a. missing) assets can go as high as $250,000 a year per school district1. Numbers like this can not only put a financial strain on individual schools, but also on the people who have a vested interest in the success of those schools. 

The monetary issues which arise from improper asset tracking in educational institutions gets even more complicated when non-physical assets are added to the equation. This is because school inventory isn’t just limited to items like furniture and computers; assets can also include petty cash funds, student activity funds, and even cash and investment accounts. If any of these types of assets aren’t effectively tracked, educational institutions can lose up to millions of dollars a year, on top of losses already incurred from physical assets.

Educational institutions whose asset management systems don’t keep track of who deals with assets on a regular basis must handle a lot of unnecessary headaches when something goes wrong. Without accountability, schools won’t easily be able to know who was responsible when an asset goes missing, when they could instead simply look up that asset’s history in the system.

The following issues could easily be rectified with a robust asset tracking system in place at educational institutions: