AssetBolt tracks the things your organization owns: the laptops on people's desks, the software seats you pay for, the spare cables in a drawer, and the cloud databases running in production.
Everything starts with picking the right record type. AssetBolt has six, and the differences between them are the single most useful thing to understand before you add anything.
A device is an individually-tracked physical item: a laptop, a monitor, a phone. Devices are the only asset type tracked one unit at a time, each with its own record.
Only devices have serial numbers, asset tags, depreciation, audit scheduling, and installed components. If you need to know which specific unit a person has, it's a device.
Devices move through these statuses: Available, Pending, Assigned, Checked out, Archived, Broken.
An accessory is a reusable physical item tracked by quantity rather than one record per unit: keyboards, mice, docks, headsets.
You hold a quantity of them, you check one out to a person, and you expect it back. The key difference from a consumable is that an accessory is returnable.
Statuses: Available, In use, Broken, Disposed, Archived.
A consumable is a physical item that gets used up and never comes back: cables, printer ink, batteries, paper.
Consumables are the only type with stock-management fields, reorder point, reorder quantity, and a unit of measure (defaulting to "pieces"). They are never assigned to a person, and there is no check-out.
Statuses: In stock, Low stock, Out of stock, Discontinued.
A component is a part that gets installed into a device: RAM, an SSD, a GPU.
This is the distinction people miss most often. Components attach to devices. Accessories attach to people. A dock that sits on a desk is an accessory. A memory module inside a laptop is a component.
Statuses: Available, In use, Low stock, Out of stock, Broken, Disposed.
A license is a software entitlement tracked by seats. Each license record has a total seat count and a number of seats currently allocated.
Checking a license out allocates one seat, checking it in releases one. Seat allocation is a counter, AssetBolt tracks how many seats are in use, not which person holds each seat.
Statuses: Active, Expired, Terminated, Pending, Maintenance expired.
A digital asset is a cloud or data resource, a database, a storage bucket, an API, a data warehouse. These are often discovered automatically by a cloud integration rather than typed in by hand.
Digital assets carry an environment (Production, Staging, Development, Test, DR, Local, Other), an access level, and optional compliance and retention metadata. They have a custodian, a person or a team who owns them, instead of an assignee, and they are never checked out.
Statuses: Active, Inactive, Maintenance, Deprecated, Archived.
Ask three questions in order.
Does it get installed inside another device? Then it's a component.
Does it come back when someone is done with it? If yes, and it's tracked individually with a serial number, it's a device. If yes, but you just hold a pile of them, it's an accessory. If no, it's a consumable.
Is it software or cloud infrastructure? A paid seat is a license. A running cloud resource is a digital asset.
Assets connect to a handful of other record types:
People — the individuals you assign assets to.
Teams — groups of people. A digital asset can name a team as its custodian.
Locations — where things are. Locations nest inside one another, so a floor can live inside a building, and can be marked virtual.
Vendors — who you buy from, optionally linked to maintenance records.
Manufacturers — who made it.
Models — a manufacturer and category grouping that devices, accessories, and consumables can share.
Categories — named groups inside each asset type. Categories are optional and help with browsing and reporting.
After you delete a record, unique values it held — like a device's serial number or a person's employee ID — become available for reuse on a new record.
