Every lease break, licence renewal and unreturned laptop, in one question

The expensive surprises in running premises and equipment are dates. A break clause that passed while nobody was looking commits the business to five more years. A support contract that lapsed is discovered the day the server fails. Software seats get bought for people who left. None of it is hard to track; it is just spread across a lease file, a spreadsheet of contracts and whoever remembers who has which laptop.

“What falls due in the next ninety days?”

An operations manager at the start of a quarter. The assistant reads the critical dates on the premises — lease ends, break clauses, rent reviews, contractor documents about to expire, service contracts up for renewal — and the contracts and licence renewals on the equipment, all most urgent first, with anything already overdue included:

GET /fm-due
GET /as-due?days=90

The second call does something worth copying. Its answer names what is not on it yet — statutory items and vehicle dates are not counted there — so a manager reading it can tell “nothing is due” from “that part is not built”. The assistant keeps that sentence. An answer that said “nothing else falls due” would be true of the list and false of the business.

The estate summary makes the same distinction for whole categories: it names what it cannot count yet, such as requests and cost per site, rather than returning a zero for them. Asked how many open requests there are across the sites, the assistant says that is not counted yet — not “none”.

“Are we paying for seats nobody uses — or using more than we pay for?”

GET /as-licences
GET /as-assets/{licence}/licence

The first call lists every software licence with its seat count and whether it is over-allocated. The second opens one: its seats, who holds them, by name. Put the holders beside the leavers from the People side, and the answer is the list of seats to reclaim before the renewal date the first question found.

“What has this leaver not handed back?”

GET /as-assets/outstanding?employee={employee}

One call, and it is the same one HR’s offboarding checklist uses for its “equipment returned” step. So the facilities team and HR are not reconciling two lists: the assistant, the leaver screen and the checklist all read the same answer.

When the question is about a place rather than a person, two more help. Who sits in a space and what equipment is in it right now — and who sat there on a past date, which is the question that settles where a missing monitor went:

GET /fm-spaces/{space}/contents
GET /fm-occupancy?current=false&on={date}

“What is this machine worth, and what would selling it do?”

GET /as-assets/{asset}/finance
GET /as-assets/{asset}/disposal-preview
GET /as-assets/drift

The finance figures — cost, depreciation method, accumulated depreciation, net book value — are read from Books at the moment of asking and never cached in the asset register, so the register cannot drift from the ledger (the reason there is one register, not three). The disposal preview says what disposing would do before anything is done. And the drift check is the register’s own honesty test: assets with no recorded events at all, which is usually a register entry nobody has looked at since it was typed.

Where it hands back to a person

• Disposing of an asset. It changes the ledger and the register at once; the preview is the assistant’s, the decision is a person’s.
• Serving notice or renewing. A break clause is exercised by somebody with authority to commit the business, in writing, not by an assistant noticing the date.
• Deleting anything. A register is only as honest as its history. Deletion is on the short list of things Rutba Assistant will never be allowed to do.