Who Has Which Item? Equipment Inventory for Schools and Offices

Why the inventory spreadsheet can't answer "where is it?"

A school or office inventory usually lives in one Excel file made for an audit. It lists "Laptop x12" in a single row, the room it was bought for, and a column for who has it that nobody keeps up to date. When a projector goes missing before an exam or a client meeting, the sheet can't tell you who took it last, and the only way to find out is to walk around asking.

The fix is two habits: one record per physical item, and a new record every time something leaves its room. Flip the switch to see the same inventory as a spreadsheet and as linked tables.

Set it up, step by step

1. List every item on its own. Create an Items table and add one record per physical object, not per type: twelve laptops are twelve records. Add a Category (Single Select: Laptop, Projector, Camera, Furniture…), a Condition (Single Select: Good, Needs repair, Broken), a photo, the purchase date (Date) and the price (Currency).
2. Give each item a code that never changes. Use a short prefix and a number, such as LPT-03 or PRJ-01, and write it on a sticker on the item. Make the code the primary property, so it's what everyone sees first on a phone card and when picking an item in another table.
3. Record where it lives and who holds it. Create a Rooms table (Computer Lab, Room 7B, Storeroom) and link each item to its room. For staff who use Ambisius, add a Held by property of the Team Member type. For people without an account, such as students, link to a People table instead.
4. Lend and return with Loans. Create a Loans table linked to Items, with Borrower, Date out and Date back. A Formula in plain words, "days between Date out and today, if Date back is empty", shows how long each item has been out. Add a Status on Items (Single Select: In storage, On loan, Under repair).
5. Handle repairs the same way. When an item breaks, set its Status to Under repair, set Condition to Needs repair and add a note. A view of everything Under repair becomes the list you hand to the technician.
6. Do the yearly count from a phone. Add a Checkbox called "Counted this year". Walk room by room, filter Items by room, open each card and tick it. Group by that checkbox and the unticked group is exactly what's still missing. Export the result to XLSX for the year-end report.

Try it here. Lend an item to someone, return it, or send it for repair, and watch the counts per status change.

Views that answer the daily questions

Group Items by Status and the screen opens with three sections: In storage, On loan and Under repair, each with its count. On Loans, save a view called "On loan for more than 14 days" that filters the days-on-loan Formula above 14 and sorts the longest first. Pin both to the workspace's Dashboards page so the person in charge of equipment sees them in one tap.

An Admin can add an Action button called "Return" on Loans. One press sets the item back to In storage and clears Held by; staff fill in Date back on the loan. Setting the button up uses credits; pressing it is free on every plan, needs no typing and either finishes completely or not at all.

Mistakes to avoid

• One row per type of item. "Laptop x12" can never tell you who holds laptop number 7. Make one record per object.
• Codes that change. If a code is renamed when an item moves rooms, old loans point at nothing. Keep the code fixed and change the room link instead.
• Typing the borrower's name by hand. "Mr Budi", "Budi S." and "B. Santoso" become three people. Pick the borrower from a list.
• Deleting a loan when the item comes back. Fill in Date back instead, so you can still see who borrowed it before.
• Letting everyone edit the item list. Set Items to Restricted and give staff Viewer access, and let them work in Loans as Editors. An Action on Loans can still update the item's status, because Editor on the button's own table is enough.

Questions people ask

Start with your most-borrowed items, the projectors, laptops and cameras, and add the rest room by room. In a week, "who has it?" is a search, not a walk around the building.