Why Growing Companies Can No Longer Treat IT Assets as an Afterthought
Out of all the aspects of running a business, managing assets like laptops and hardware is far from the most glamorous. In many cases, it seems insignificant in the grand scheme of things. But as the business grows, the problem often shows up suddenly.
Around your 30th to 50th hire, someone in finance will ask a simple question. “How many laptops do we actually own, and where are they?”
That question will likely trigger a scramble. Somebody pulls up a spreadsheet that hasn’t been touched in months and only includes partial data.
This is often the first sign that a control your company will eventually be asked to prove simply doesn’t exist yet. And the longer you wait to build it, the more expensive the fix becomes.
📖 Definition
IT asset management is the practice of tracking company-owned hardware and software across its full lifecycle, from purchase and assignment through reassignment, repair, and eventual disposal. It’s the ongoing record of who has what and what state it’s in, not a one-time snapshot of current inventory.
Most Companies Can’t Answer the Question
You might assume that losing track of company hardware is a startup-specific problem, something companies outgrow. The data suggests otherwise.
In Capterra’s Employee Offboarding Survey of nearly 300 HR professionals, 71% reported that at least one departing employee failed to return company-owned equipment like a laptop or smartphone. Among hybrid and remote workers, the rate was 17% higher than it was for on-site employees.
What’s telling about that survey is who was asked. The respondents were HR professionals, because at most growing companies, HR is the team dealing with the fallout of offboarding. IT often has no visibility into the process at all. Nobody owns this, and the result is a growing pile of devices that exist in a gray area between “assigned” and “missing.”
The equipment problem concentrates where headcount is growing fastest. Remote and hybrid roles are where the devices are hardest to recover.
What Untracked Hardware Costs
The hardware cost is the easy part to quantify. Say you have 40 employees and 15% annual turnover. That’s six departures per year. If even half of those result in an unreturned or delayed device, and each replacement costs $1,200 to $1,800, you’re looking at $3,600 to $5,400 in avoidable hardware spend annually. That’s a conservative scenario at a small company. Scale it to 150 employees, and the numbers get uncomfortable quickly.
The second layer is harder to put a dollar figure on but carries more risk. A laptop that was never returned still holds cached credentials, browser sessions, locally saved files, and in many cases active access to company systems. According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach report, the average cost of a data breach in the United States hit a record $10.22 million, with unmanaged devices and poor access controls named as contributing factors.
An honest caveat here. That number is heavily skewed by large enterprises and regulated industries. Most 50-person companies will never see a breach bill anywhere near that figure. But even a fraction of it as a compliance investigation, a lost client, or a cyber insurance claim is enough to make an untracked laptop one of the more expensive things a growing company can ignore.
When the Spreadsheet Breaks
According to the Flexera 2025 State of ITAM Report, complete visibility across the technology stack dropped from 47% to 43% year over year. And those were enterprise-level organizations with dedicated ITAM (IT Asset Management) teams. For growing companies managing inventory in a shared Google Sheet, the number is almost certainly worse.
The tipping points are predictable. At 25 employees, a spreadsheet works because one person holds the full picture in their head. At 60 employees, that person has either left or stopped updating the sheet. By 150, with contractors, multiple offices, and remote hires across time zones, the spreadsheet is misleading. That’s worse than having nothing, because people still make decisions based on it.
The People Who Will Ask to See It
Founders tend to think of IT asset management as internal housekeeping. In practice, it’s one of the first things outside parties evaluate.
Your cyber insurance underwriter will ask about device inventory, endpoint management, and access controls as part of the application. The answers directly affect your premium. Companies that can’t demonstrate a basic level of asset tracking often face higher rates or exclusions on their policies.
If you pursue SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, you’ll find that asset inventory sits right at the foundation. The CIS Critical Security Controls, one of the most widely referenced cybersecurity frameworks, lists “Inventory and Control of Enterprise Assets” as Control 1. It’s literally the first thing on the list. Flexera’s research reinforces why this matters financially. In their 2026 State of ITAM survey, 48% of organizations had received a software audit in the past year, and 44% had spent more than $1 million on audit-related expenses over three years.
And if you’re ever on the other side of a due diligence process, whether for a funding round or an acquisition, expect the same question. Investors and acquirers want to see that you know what you own, who has it, and what happens to it when someone leaves.
What Good Looks Like at Your Size
Before you evaluate any tool, you need to define the minimum viable asset record.
📋 Checklist
✅ Asset tag or internal ID
✅ Serial number
✅ Device type and model
✅ Purchase date and cost
✅ Current assignee
✅ Assignment date
✅ Status (active, in storage, pending return, retired)
✅ Warranty expiration
The two moments that matter most are onboarding and offboarding. Every device issue and every device return should be triggered by your HR or identity system, not by someone remembering to send a Slack message.
This is where purpose-built IT asset management software earns its place. BlueTally, for example, syncs directly with identity providers and device management tools like Intune, Jamf, and Entra ID, which means the asset register updates automatically when someone joins or leaves. It also handles the lifecycle tracking, audit workflows, and checkout history that a spreadsheet simply can’t maintain.
Where to Start This Week
✅ Action Step
Block one afternoon. Export your employee list from your identity provider. Export whatever device records you have. Reconcile the two lists. Look specifically for names with no matching device and devices with no matching name. That exercise alone will tell you where you stand.
From there, decide who owns the register going forward. This doesn’t need to be a senior hire. It needs to be a named person with a defined responsibility. Then pick your system, whether that’s a lightweight ITAM tool or an upgraded spreadsheet with enforced fields and a review cadence.
Your next hire or your next departure is the test. If the device shows up on day one and comes back on the last day without anyone chasing it down manually, the system is working.
