What do you need to do now to track your inventory? Why do you need to track inventory – and why isn’t there a killer app for that yet?
A significant number of clients come to Community IT without any inventory tracking at all. Besides being a financial risk this is a clear security risk – especially if you have no system in place to off-board staff who leave your nonprofit but keep their laptop and access to private files and business subscriptions.
Why is it so hard to track inventory if you are a smaller organization (under 100 staff)? Listen to CEO Johan Hammerstrom share the three categories of inventory you need to track, and where that information probably lives at your nonprofit. With a little prioritization now, you can ensure your organization is protected from bad actors and can account for all your laptops. Johan shares these IT inventory tips to help our community avoid headaches and security risks.
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Some Key IT Inventory Tips:
There is no perfect software or app to track inventory for smaller organizations. You will have to track it yourself, it cannot easily be delegated and philosophically probably shouldn’t be outsourced. A spreadsheet can work for smaller organizations.
Three categories of inventory you need to track:
- Equipment as an asset that the organization has purchased. Need to track it as part of financial accounting. Usually tracked by finance team.
- Who has that equipment been assigned to? Which laptop went to which staff member? This can also be tracked by the finance or HR team, or the IT team.
- Who is logged in to that computer? Who is the end user and which apps and licenses are they using (that the organization is paying for). Where is it located, how is it logged into the internet, who is the last person to log in to it? Your IT team will be able to track this.
You should cross reference these three categories and reconcile them periodically.
You need a standard process for off-boarding staff and recovering equipment from them/deactivating their subscriptions and access.
Managing subscriptions is a related issue, and is equally important for your nonprofit to track, both for financial reasons (paying for subscriptions that are not being used, or paying for individual subscriptions when an enterprise subscription would be easier/cheaper/have more features) and for cybersecurity reasons.
Presenters
Johan Hammerstrom’s focus and expertise are in nonprofit IT leadership, governance practices, and nonprofit IT strategy. In addition to deep experience supporting hundreds of nonprofit clients for over 20 years, Johan has a technical background as a computer engineer and a strong servant-leadership style as the head of an employee-owned small service business. After advising and strategizing with nonprofit clients over the years, he has gained a wealth of insight into the budget and decision-making culture at nonprofits – a culture that enables creative IT management but can place constraints on strategies and implementation.
As CEO, Johan provides high-level direction and leadership in client partnerships. He also guides Community IT’s relationship to its Board and ESOP employee-owners. Johan is also instrumental in building a Community IT value of giving back to the sector by sharing resources and knowledge through free website materials, monthly webinars, and external speaking engagements.
Carolyn Woodard is currently head of Marketing and Outreach at Community IT Innovators. She has served many roles at Community IT, from client to project manager to marketing. With over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit world, including as a nonprofit technology project manager and Director of IT at both large and small organizations, Carolyn knows the frustrations and delights of working with technology professionals, accidental techies, executives, and staff to deliver your organization’s mission and keep your IT infrastructure operating. She has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Johns Hopkins University and received her undergraduate degree in English Literature from Williams College.
She was happy to have this podcast conversation with Johan Hammerstrom on IT Inventory Tips. Find more resources on Nonprofit IT Leadership here.
Ready to get strategic about your IT?
Community IT has been serving nonprofits exclusively for twenty years. We offer Managed IT support services for nonprofits that want to outsource all or part of their IT support and hosted services. For a fixed monthly fee, we provide unlimited remote and on-site help desk support, proactive network management, and ongoing IT planning from a dedicated team of experts in nonprofit-focused IT. And our clients benefit from our IT Business Managers team who will work with you to plan your IT investments and technology roadmap if you don’t have an in-house IT Director.
We constantly research and evaluate new technology to ensure that you get cutting-edge solutions that are tailored to your organization, using standard industry tech tools that don’t lock you into a single vendor or consultant. And we don’t treat any aspect of nonprofit IT as if it is too complicated for you to understand. When you are worried about your email safety and spam, you shouldn’t have to worry about understanding your provider.
If you have questions about these IT Inventory tips you can learn more about our approach and client services and contact us here.
We think your IT vendor should be able to explain everything without jargon or lingo. If you can’t understand your IT management strategy to your own satisfaction, keep asking your questions until you find an outsourced IT provider who will partner with you for well-managed IT.
If you’re ready to gain peace of mind about your IT support, let’s talk.
Transcript
Carolyn Woodard: Welcome to the Community IT Innovators Podcast. My name is Carolyn Woodard, and I am the Outreach Director for Community IT and the host of this podcast. And today, I’m really excited to welcome back our CEO, Johan Hammerstrom. We have a couple of questions about inventory management. Johan, would you like to introduce yourself?
Johan Hammerstrom: Thanks, Carolyn. It’s good to be back on the podcast. My name is Johan Hammerstrom and I’m the CEO at Community IT.
Nonprofit IT Inventory Management Approaches
Carolyn Woodard: You and I were talking about one of the requests that we often get, especially from new clients, around inventory management.
Can you talk a little bit about our approach to that, and what are some good ways to handle your inventory?
Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah. Inventory management is a common need that organizations have. It’s actually, I think, grown considerably in the last five years and in the five years leading up to the pandemic, as more and more staff at non-profit organizations switched from using desktop computers, which were always at the office, always at someone’s desk, to laptop computers that people started to carry around with them.
Laptop computers are often in someone’s home and may never or rarely come into the office. The need to manage that inventory has really grown a lot over the last five to ten years.
Carolyn Woodard: Is that something that we do for clients, or do you have tips for how to manage inventory? Do you just need a spreadsheet?
Johan Hammerstrom: For a smaller organization, a spreadsheet might be a perfect solution for managing inventory.
Inventory is something that we can certainly help with, but there are actually a number of different components that are important, or elements that are important to build into an inventory management process. So that’s something we really try to encourage our clients to think about inventory management, not as a technology solution, but rather as a business process.
What Do you Need to Track Your Inventory?
Carolyn Woodard: You said that for a smaller organization, a spreadsheet might be all they need. So that makes me think, does it go in bands of how large your organization is? And what sort of things do you need to track in this inventory?
Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, that’s a great question. We like to break it down into three categories. And in some cases, you might be able to track all three things in the same place.
And for larger, more complicated organizations, you might have three different systems tracking these three different aspects of a computer, basically, or a piece of equipment.
Equipment as an Asset
The first is the equipment as an asset. It’s an asset that the organization has purchased, and they need to track that as part of their financial accounting process. Those assets may get tracked in a financial management solution. The finance team will have their approach for tracking those assets.
It’s particularly important in cases where organizations are leasing their equipment, and they need to return it at the end of the lease period. So they need to be able to track that equipment down, and mark it as having been returned to the manufacturer when the lease period is over.
That’s the first category of tracking. What equipment was purchased and is owned by the organization? When was it purchased? Who is it purchased from? And is there a unique asset tracking number that’s being used by the organization to track that asset?
Who is the Equipment Assigned to?
The second thing that needs to be tracked is who is that equipment been given to or assigned to? There’s unfortunately no automated way, no technological way out of this requirement. And it’s really important that somebody in the organization owns this part of inventory, and it’s important that it’s clearly identified who that is. Is it the IT department? Is it operations? Is it finance?
Somebody is making the determination as to which piece of equipment is assigned to which staff person. And that’s where that could be tracked in the financial management package. It could be tracked in a separate spreadsheet.
For larger organizations, there are systems that it may make sense to track. So, for example, if you’re a school and you’re assigning computers to students, then if you have a student information system where all the students’ IDs are kept, and you’re tracking other things about the student, that may be the perfect place to track which equipment you’ve assigned to them. Other organizations may have other types of assets that they assign to their staff. That’s probably the best place to track that information.
It’s going to vary from organization to organization, but you have to be clear about where you’re tracking that information.
And critically, you have to make sure you’re updating it, because oftentimes computers will shockingly stop working, and people will send their computer that’s not working in, or someone will leave the organization, and they’ll return or not return their piece of equipment, and then that equipment gets assigned to someone else, given to someone else, sometimes by the IT department.
If it’s not being updated in this tracking spreadsheet, now there’s a lot of confusion around who has what equipment. And that’s a problem that’s maybe manageable with 10 to 15 staff, but once you get up to 30 or 40 staff, and certainly once you hit over 100 staff, you’ve lost track at that point of who has what equipment.
Who is Logged In to the Asset
Carolyn Woodard: And then you said there’s a third aspect?
Johan Hammerstrom: Yes. The third aspect is where we come in, and that is who is logged in to the computer.We have a full suite of endpoint management software that we place on all of the computers that we manage for our customers. And that software is very powerful, and it can do a great job of tracking lots of pieces of information about the equipment, where is it located, how is it connected to the Internet, who is the last person to have logged in to it.
That gives you more of a real-time picture of what equipment is being used and who is using it. And that’s important because the other two approaches to tracking are sort of static. They’re taking a snapshot of something that happened historically.
The remote monitoring and management solutions are giving you a real-time picture of who’s using the computer today. That doesn’t tell you who the computer was assigned to, nor does it always tell you when the computer was purchased, although our solution is able to take the serial number and then cross-reference it with a public database provided by the manufacturers, and basically tell you according to them when the equipment was purchased and when the warranty expires.
We recommend cross-referencing those three solutions so that you’re reconciling them on a regular basis to make sure that the information matches.
IT Inventory Tracking Roles
Carolyn Woodard: It sounds like what you’re saying is your IT provider, if it’s an outsourced provider like we are or an internal IT department, cannot do this on their own. It’s not something that you can hand over and say, hey, can you track all my inventory for me? There needs to be someone in your nonprofit who is the owner of this process. Does that sound right?
Johan Hammerstrom: I think that’s accurate.
Finance Tracks Equipment as an Asset
I think the first step, which is tracking the equipment as an asset, in my opinion, belongs squarely in the finance department’s set of responsibilities. That can’t be handed off to somebody else.
Carolyn Woodard: Well, that makes sense because aren’t they dealing with the taxes and the accounting for the assets over time and…
Johan Hammerstrom: depreciation of equipment, exactly.
Carolyn Woodard: And if something gets lost or stolen, aren’t they the one that’s going to have to account for that?
Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, I think so… And different nonprofits have different rules when it comes to how expensive the item needs to be in order for them to depreciate it. They have different rules when it comes to what shows up during their financial audit process. But only the finance team knows what those rules are. And should. And should be responsible.
IT May Track Assigning the Assets to Staff
In the second case, who’s assigning the computers, that can be delegated to IT, but it needs to be clear that IT is responsible for making all of those decisions. And at the end of the day, the physical management of the asset needs to go along with that responsibility.
So, if you’re outsourcing your IT to someone who never comes into the office, and you have an office manager who’s receiving the laptops, updating them, and sending them back out to staff, then that’s the person who should be responsible for maintaining the asset assignment database, whether that database is an actual database or a spreadsheet.
We have a laptop warehousing service that we provide for our customers where their staff send the laptops to us and we store them, repair them if needed, and reset them for redeployment. Then it becomes our responsibility to track who’s the asset being assigned to. So that second one, you could outsource it to your IT provider, but if you do, then what you’re really outsourcing is the physical management of that equipment.
Carolyn Woodard: And it sounds like you would still need to have rules about devices. So which devices? It sounds like it’s the ones that you purchase.
Somebody’s using their own personal phone or iPad to do work, versus you providing them with, well, like in the old days, if you had a company car or a company phone, that would be something that the company would track.
Johan Hammerstrom: That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. I think it can get tricky because it starts to get into the budget questions.
The executives, no offense to the executives who are listening, the executives often want Macs oftentimes, or the design team wants Macs, or the research team needs a more powerful computer, then everybody else has because they’re doing a lot of statistical and data analysis.
And so, it’s easy if you have one model of laptop and you’re buying the same model for everybody, and it all fits within one budget.
It starts to get more difficult if you have multiple models in your fleet, and someone from the data team leaves, they send back their high-performance laptop.
You need to make sure that you’re saving that for their replacement and not sending it to an intern, who doesn’t need a high-performance laptop. Poor interns. My apologies to all the interns who are listening. You’re vital to the success of the nonprofit sector, and I’m sorry you always end up with the worst equipment.
Tracking Subscriptions
Carolyn Woodard: What about subscriptions? That seems like another thing that we need to track because a lot of organizations are paying per subscription or per tool that they have a license to. Does that also go in your inventory spreadsheet?
Johan Hammerstrom: That’s a great question and a great point. It can go in the inventory spreadsheet. I think it’s a little bit different in that those are not physical assets, and so generally speaking, they’re not always flowing through the finance department.
That’s where shadow IT becomes a problem, where someone in digital marketing finds a great tool that helps them with putting together marketing materials, and they sign up for it. And maybe they have a line item in their budget that they can just plug their company card in, and it doesn’t make sense for the organization to buy a subscription to it, but it does make sense for this one person to. So that’s how shadow IT happens, and that becomes a different problem from inventory management, but a problem nonetheless, and it can create a lot of issues, especially larger organizations.
We were helping one of our clients rename themselves, they had to go through this renaming process to rename all their user accounts, and we wanted to make sure we knew where all of these accounts were getting used, because once we changed the username, they might lose access to those third-party solutions that they were using. And this is a 200-person organization.
We found there were like 50 people who were using, I forget the name of the solution. It might have been Canto, which is a digital access asset management solution. But there were about a quarter of the organization that had gone out and signed up for these accounts on their own, and everybody had their own individual accounts, a lot of free accounts, but some people were paying for theirs. And that’s a case where, oh man, it really should have been like an enterprise subscription, probably would have given them a lot more features and saved them a lot of money.
But those are the sorts of things that, especially in this day and age, it’s really hard for IT to gain visibility into that, if they’re not running reports regularly, and a lot of IT departments just don’t have the bandwidth to stay on top of those sorts of issues. So, it’s a challenge.
Saving Money by Ending Unused Subscriptions
Carolyn Woodard: I have a friend who is a financial planner, and so she posts tips online from time to time. And that was one of the things she just said in your personal life is, to know what subscriptions you have and how much you’re paying for them, and make decisions, be intentional about it.
If you have a subscription that you haven’t used in a while, but it just keeps renewing monthly and it’s only four bucks, and so you don’t really pay attention to it. She said you can save a lot of money.
And I know for nonprofits, paying for those subscriptions that they aren’t really using, or like you said, they could get an enterprise-wide subscription that had more features that people could use. That makes a lot of sense financially. So that would just be something that leadership needs to take on, is that kind of project.
Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah. Ideally, IT is putting those subscriptions in their budget, and that’s where you’ve got visibility into. And normally, for large subscriptions that are being used by the whole organization like Microsoft or Google, or Zoom, will be enterprise subscriptions.
Adobe is actually, that could be a whole other podcast. Adobe licensing is kind of in it. Although, they moved towards cloud-based subscription. That’s kind of the model that they’re in now. And the more they move in that direction, I guess the easier it kind of becomes to manage. But we’re still in a little bit of a transitional period where a lot of nonprofits still have older Adobe licenses that they purchased from TechSoup that they’re giving to their staff to use because Adobe is expensive. And managing the array of licensing types that come with Adobe can be challenging.
Carolyn Woodard: Yeah. That does sound like another podcast that would be helpful.
Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah. I’m not the best person to talk about it either. So I think that would be a good podcast. (Listen to our podcast on IT Subscriptions Tracking Tips with Pat Sprehe for best practices on tracking Adobe)
Carolyn Woodard: I have just a couple more questions.
Standards for Inventory Tracking
One is, it sounds like this is something that organizations should be doing, but there aren’t standards or requirements in place so that every organization is doing it. But it is a common problem that when we have a new client, they may have inadequate inventory.
Johan Hammerstrom: Yes. It’s a common problem because I think there’s not a great solution. There’s not a great technical solution.
There’s not a great service that does it for you. Like if there was a Zoom app of inventory management, it wouldn’t be an issue, but there isn’t. So, I think a lot of people start off using a spreadsheet. But anytime someone’s using a spreadsheet, they always have this little voice in the back of their mind. “I can’t believe you’re using a spreadsheet for this.” There’s got to be a better way. No one uses a spreadsheet and says, I’ve reached the top. Like this is it. This is the best it can be.
And then, especially as the organization grows, the spreadsheet starts to feel unwieldy, and they want to have a dedicated solution, but then it becomes challenging, figuring out what that solution is.
And there’s really no really good industry-leading software.
We’ve done a lot of research into it and have experimented with a lot of different packages, and none of them are that great. And I think it’s because at the enterprise level, they’re using their enterprise software, whatever it is, they’re using the software that they use to track staff, or they’re using the software that they use to track all the equipment they give out. And so there’s no space for this particular niche of software to thrive.
Carolyn Woodard: That makes sense. I think also with a spreadsheet or any kind of task like that, that you tell yourself, well, I’ll do this monthly, and it won’t be so hard. But it’s kind of unpleasant, kind of boring. And sometimes it doesn’t change all that much. And so, you just let it sit for six months. And then you’re like, oh, actually, that six months was two years was the last time I looked at this spreadsheet. And all of the laptops are different now.
And I think that’s another piece of it, right? We recommend people don’t have older laptops. They would renew those laptops every three years, every four years. And then you really have to be tracking your inventory because you need to know which are the oldest ones that you’re going to replace and who they’re going to go to, as you said.
Why is Tracking IT Inventory Necessary?
To finish up, could we take a step back and say, so it’s kind of unpleasant, kind of boring, but really necessary.
Why is it really necessary?
Philosophically, what’s the number one thing you could say to yourself to make yourself take inventory seriously?
Johan Hammerstrom: Well, I think more than anything, it’s probably a security risk. In that, if you have staff who no longer work for the organization, you haven’t returned their computers, you basically have a part of your system out there in the world that’s potentially no longer managed or being tracked by you. So that’s number one, I think.
Number two, it’s good stewardship of the organization’s resources. And if you’re sending people laptops and then not collecting them when they leave, you’re basically, you have a laptop giveaway program for your staff in effect.
Now, we laugh, but some organizations may say, “you know what, it’s not worth the hassle. And if you work here for more than two years, when you leave or however you leave, we wipe the laptop, which you can do remotely, and then you keep it and you deal with it. Do what you want with it. Keep it, use it, give it away.”
You know, that’s not necessarily the worst policy in the world, but all of it needs to come back to policy.
Carolyn Woodard: Great. Those are all great tips. Thank you so much, Johan. Appreciate your time today.
Johan Hammerstrom: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you, Carolyn.