At five people, your equipment register is a person. Usually you. You know the laptop with the dented lid went to the senior associate, and the spare charger lives in the second drawer. That is not sloppiness. At five people, a person is a better register than a form.
The shift every growing firm has to make is from memory to system. Most founders assume it arrives near 50 staff. It arrives much earlier, and quietly. Nothing collapses on a Monday morning. Instead you buy a monitor you already own, or an intern leaves in March and nobody can say where the laptop went. By 50 you are not managing equipment, you are reconstructing two years of it from WhatsApp.
So the useful question is not your headcount. It is which of the following has already happened. Each habit below works genuinely well at five. Each fails at an identifiable moment, usually earlier than it feels.
1. "Everyone knows who has what"
Why it works at 5: You have maybe twenty items and you see every person holding them every day. Any question is answered by asking across the room, and the record updates itself.
Breaks when: the first person who knew something leaves, or two people answer the same question differently and you have no way to settle it.
Tribal memory does not survive turnover or division. Two people each hold half the picture and neither knows which half is missing. Articled assistants and interns rotate out every few months, taking the only record of what they were issued. Nothing visibly breaks on the day the knowledge walks out.
What replaces it: One register treated as the only source of truth, where every item has an ID, a current holder and a date. One named person owns keeping it current. If an item is not in the register, the firm does not own it.
2. One shared spreadsheet anyone can edit
Why it works at 5: It is a real upgrade on memory. Free, instant, and already familiar to everyone.
Breaks when: a third person starts editing it, or you need to know who was holding an item last month.
A spreadsheet has no row ownership and no history. Someone sorts by a column and silently scrambles the pairings. Someone types a new holder over the old one instead of logging a transfer, erasing the previous custody. No one is accountable for any given row, so rows go stale without going visibly wrong: the sheet looks exactly as confident when it is wrong as when it is right.
What replaces it: Make every change an entry, not an edit. Each movement becomes a new dated line: item, from, to, date, who recorded it. Current state is read off the log, never typed over it.
3. Verbal handover: "just take this laptop"
Why it works at 5: Trust is real and the loop is a day long: if something goes missing you know who to ask. Signing paperwork between five people who eat lunch together is ceremony, not control.
Breaks when: the first employee exits, and again at the first disagreement about who cracked a screen.
There is no proof of what was issued in either direction, and that cuts both ways. The firm cannot state what it gave out. The employee cannot show the screen was already damaged. Returns fail harder than issues: a leaver hands kit to whoever is at the nearest desk, unrecorded. Exit processes catch laptops. They miss chargers, dongles, monitors, headsets and the old company phone.
What replaces it: A one-page issue and return acknowledgement, signed or confirmed by email, listing every item with its serial and condition. Attach the return side to exit sign-off so nothing clears until the list clears.
4. Buying per person as needs arise
Why it works at 5: No forecasting, no money sitting in idle hardware, and specs stay current because you buy at the moment of need.
Breaks when: you start keeping spares, or the same kit sits in more than one place.
Purchasing decentralises before anyone decides that it should. Nobody checks existing stock first, because there is no stock view to check. So a monitor gets bought in Pune while an identical one sits unused in Mumbai. Kit freed up by resignations and role changes never gets recirculated. You pay twice, once in INR and once in cupboard space.
What replaces it: A compulsory stock check before any purchase request goes up. Keep a small spares pool with a named owner, and make reassignment the default first answer to any request.
5. No labels: "it's the Dell one"
Why it works at 5: Physical descriptions are unique, because the kit is varied. Three laptops, three obviously different machines.
Breaks when: you buy your second identical batch.
Standardising procurement, which you should do, is the very thing that destroys your ability to identify kit by description. Forty identical laptops and forty identical chargers mean the register and the hardware cannot be reconciled by eye. Serial numbers exist, but they live on the underside of the machine, so nobody reads them during a handover. Chargers, dongles and bags are the worst case: identical, high churn, untraceable, permanently drifting.
What replaces it: A printed asset ID on the outside of every item, chargers and bags included, matching the register exactly. Apply the label at receipt, before the item ever reaches a desk.
6. Equipment requests approved informally over WhatsApp
Why it works at 5: It is the fastest possible route. Someone asks, the founder replies "go ahead", and the matter is closed inside a minute.
Breaks when: the founder is travelling and a request stalls, or someone asks who sanctioned a purchase and nobody can find out.
Two things fail at once. The founder becomes a bottleneck on a decision that no longer needs them, and the chat leaves no retrievable trail. Six months later nobody can say who approved a ninety thousand rupee machine, or on what basis. Requests also disappear silently, which trains people to buy on personal cards and claim it back.
What replaces it: A written request route with a stated spend threshold and a named approver below it. Under the threshold, the ops or admin lead decides. Above it, it goes up. Either way the request and the answer sit in the same place.
7. AMC, CMC and warranty cover living in the vendor's email thread
Why it works at 5: You have a handful of contracts, one vendor relationship, and a renewal month the founder genuinely remembers.
Breaks when: you take on a second vendor, or a renewal charges you for kit you no longer own.
Cover is attached to an email thread rather than to an asset, which produces two mirror-image failures. Renewals auto-charge on kit you have already retired, sold or scrapped. Cover on kit you still rely on lapses, because the only reminder was the vendor's goodwill or an inbox nobody reads any more. Neither failure announces itself. You find out when you pay for nothing, or when a part fails and you are not covered.
What replaces it: Record cover against the asset ID: start date, end date, vendor, and what is actually covered. Review the expiry list monthly as a standing agenda item, not as a search after something breaks.
8. Fixing things only when they break
Why it works at 5: It is the rational policy. A machine that works needs nothing spent on it, and with five machines you remember which one is trouble.
Breaks when: the same item comes back for a third repair and nobody can tell you it is the third.
With no per-unit repair history, every repair-or-replace call gets made in isolation and under time pressure. One laptop can take four repairs in eighteen months, each individually cheap, each approved by a different person, the total never visible to anybody. You also cannot see patterns across a batch bought together. Downtime stays invisible, because nobody records how long the person waited.
What replaces it: Log every repair against the asset ID with date, fault, cost and days out of service. Agree one rule in advance, such as a third repair triggering a replacement review, so the decision is not argued from scratch each time.
9. Counting everything once a year over a weekend
Why it works at 5: A full count takes an hour. It is genuinely complete, so you can trust the number.
Breaks when: you run the first count where some of the kit is not in the building.
The count stops finishing. Hybrid staff have laptops at home, branch kit is counted by whoever is there, client-site machines are assumed present, and the store cupboard gets a rough tally. A partial count is worse than no count, because it produces a figure everyone treats as verified. The annual window has a second cost: an item can be missing for eleven months before anyone looks.
What replaces it: Rolling verification. Each month, verify one slice: one branch, or one category, or a tenth of the register. Record who confirmed it and when. Twelve small confirmations are worth more than one unfinished weekend.
10. One office, one location field
Why it works at 5: Everybody is in one room. Location carries no information.
Breaks when: kit starts living somewhere that is not the office.
"Mumbai" collapses four genuinely different situations into one word. Kit at the office, kit at someone's home in Thane, kit at a client site and kit in the cupboard need different handling for retrieval, insurance and verification, but the register cannot tell them apart. When someone resigns you cannot produce a list of what is physically in their house. When a branch moves or opens in a new city, you cannot say what has to travel.
What replaces it: Separate custody from location and record both. Who holds the item is one field. Where it physically sits is another. Keep the second to a short fixed list: office, home, client site, store, in repair, in transit.
What to fix in the next 30 days
Smallest first, because the small one unblocks the rest.
1. This week: label everything. Buy a label printer, assign IDs, and stick them on, chargers and bags included. One afternoon with an intern. Nothing else here works until items can be identified without guessing.
2. In the next fortnight: write down two things. The issue and return acknowledgement, one page. The approval threshold and who decides under it, one paragraph. Tie the return side to exit sign-off, then backfill for current staff as they come through the office.
3. By day 30: consolidate every AMC, CMC and warranty into one list keyed to asset IDs, with expiry dates and what each covers. Put a monthly expiry review in a named person's calendar.
Firms that have outgrown the spreadsheet stage sometimes move to a dedicated asset tracking app. Stackroom is one option, covering equipment custody, location, maintenance and AMC cover.
