Most companies have three asset registers and none of them agree

Business software collects assets in three places. HR keeps a list of issued kit so it knows what to reclaim when somebody leaves. Accounting keeps a fixed-asset register so it can depreciate. The plant keeps machine records so it can service them.

All three describe some of the same objects. None of them is complete, none matches the others, and the reconciliation only happens when an auditor asks where the laptops went.

One register, three readers

Rutba Facilities is one register of everything the organisation owns that is not stock: laptops, machines, vehicles, buildings and their spaces. HR’s leaver checklist reads it. The ledger depreciates from it. Maintenance schedules work on it.

The financial twin sits on the same row: cost, salvage, method and useful life. That is not a copy pushed to accounting; it is the accounting-relevant fields of the asset, on the asset, read by the ledger.

Custody is events, not a field

The design decision worth explaining is how custody is recorded. The obvious implementation is a "current holder" field you overwrite when the laptop changes hands. It is also the implementation that loses the trail: overwrite it four times and the first three holders are gone.

Custody here is insert-only events. Issued to a person, moved to a bay, serviced, returned: each is a row that is added, never edited. Who had what and when it came back is a record rather than an argument, and the question an auditor asks has an answer that does not depend on nobody having overwritten anything.

A field you overwrite answers "who has it". A log answers "who had it", which is the question that gets asked.

Leavers, checked against the register

The leaver checklist checks what this register shows a person holding. That is the point where the three-register problem usually shows itself: somebody leaves, HR ticks a box, and the laptop stays on the fixed-asset register for two more years because nobody told accounting.

The issuing half is not joined up yet. HR still issues equipment from its own list, so until that moves onto the register the leaver check reads both.

Statutory inspections as data

The statutory-inspection register is meant to hold its catalogue as data rather than code, so that due-date lists will match the jurisdiction rather than a developer’s assumption about it. It is designed, not built, and which jurisdiction’s catalogue comes first is still to be decided, a limitation worth stating rather than discovering.

One thing to know if you are also buying production

A machine is an asset. So the Maintenance application in Rutba Manufacturing and this product are two surfaces over one work engine, rather than two registers of the same machines. Neither is a copy of the other, and you never reconcile them, which is the entire argument of this post, applied to ourselves.

Play the film

Added 30 October 2026: Rutba Facilities on film, with an invented business.