Asset Numbering Scheme Worksheet

This worksheet is for the identity of a thing that moves, not the address of a place that does not.

For the address problem — shelves, bays and bins — use the warehouse bin location guide instead. Work through the five sections in order and you finish with a format you can commit to. Nothing here is uploaded, there is no signup, and the page does nothing on the network.

Company / site: ____________________ Completed by: ____________________ Date: ____________________

1. Scope count — how many numbers will you ever need?

The failure is never running out on day one. It is running out in year four, when the workaround you invent in a hurry becomes permanent. Tally what you have, then project.

Rough class of asset	Count today	Bought per yeartypical	Notes
Powered tools and equipment
Hand tools worth tagging
Access, lifting and safety gear ladders, harnesses, slings — often on a legal inspection schedule
IT kit and electronics
Furniture and fixtures
Vehicles, trailers, plant


Totals

Projection. assets today + (bought per year × 10 years) = , then doubled, because you always end up tracking more categories than you planned = . Now add a digit.

3 digits — up to 999 4 digits — up to 9,999 (default) 5 digits — up to 99,999 6 digits

Four digits is right for the large majority of small operations. Take five if you track consumable-adjacent things or expect to acquire another business. Looking silly costs you nothing — a leading zero on a tag bothers no one. Running out costs you the scheme.

Do not leave gaps in an asset sequence. Gaps belong to shelf and bin codes, which sit in an order and have neighbors — S01, S02, S05 leaves room for S03 and S04. Asset 0044 is not between 0043 and 0045, so a gap here holds open a space nothing can occupy. See the warehouse bin location guide for the rule that applies to places. And never reuse a number: when an asset is scrapped, its number retires with it.

2. Prefix decision — does this prefix survive?

Write each prefix you are tempted by, then check the boxes it passes. One prefix maximum. AST- with no meaning at all is a valid answer and the safest one.

Candidate prefix	Fixed for the life of the thing?	Told apart at a glance, physically?	Nobody can argue which applies?	Survives a building move?	Survives the person leaving?	Verdict

The verdict line. Would you renumber the asset if this attribute changed? If yes, it can be a prefix. If you would leave the number alone and edit a field, it is not a prefix — it is a field. If people can argue about which prefix applies, the prefix is not fixed and does not belong in the number. LIFT-0043 is fine. LIFT-YRD-2024-0043 is a smart number wearing a disguise, and two of those four segments will be wrong eventually.

3. Format builder — compose it, then see where it ends

Prefix (or none)

Separator

Padded sequence

Worked example: AST + - + 0043 = AST-0043. One fixed prefix, four padded digits, nothing else. Deliberately boring, which is what you want in an identifier.

Your composed format: _________________________ First number you will assign: _________________ Last number this format allows: ______________ Can you honestly say you will never get there? ______

4. Column list — everything you resisted encoding

Attributes belong in columns because columns are editable and numbers are not. The four at the top are the ones that must never go in the digits: they all change.

Column beside the number	Why it is not in the number	Where it lands on import
Current location	Things move — every day	location
Assigned to / holder	People leave; departments merge	no import field
Acquisition date	Publishes the age of your kit; awkward on rebuilds and used buys	no import field
Purchase cost	Out of date immediately; nobody's business who reads the tag	cost not the field labeled selling price
Asset number (padded, prefixed)	This is the identity	sku — the item code
Name		name
Class or category	Reclassify without renumbering	category
Manufacturer part	Identifies a product type, not your unit	notes a column headed UPC auto-maps to SKU — rename it
Manufacturer serial (verbatim)	Theirs, not yours; plenty of assets have none	no import field
Condition	Changes with every inspection	no import field
Old number (legacy)	Still out there in other people's records	no import field
Notes		notes

Before you import. Map the asset-number column to the SKU field — that is the item code — explicitly. Leaving it unmapped generates placeholder codes, and the numbers on your tags and the numbers in your system become two different sets. Five columns above have no import field at all — a manufacturer serial, a holder's name, a condition rating, an acquisition date and an old legacy number. Fold those into the notes column, or add them by hand after import, item by item. A holder's name is the exception: who has a thing is tracked by check-in and check-out, a Pro-plan feature, not by a notes column. A field you add to an item by hand cannot be imported into, so a field of your own is not a bulk-load path. There is no location import either: a location is created by name only from the location cell on a parts row, so parent and type have to be set afterwards if you want them — by hand, or by asking the IQ Assistant to build the location tree. And watch the two money columns — the one labeled selling price is what you charge and cost is what you paid, so an asset sheet's purchase-price column belongs in cost.

The leading-zero spreadsheet trap. Open a CSV in a spreadsheet and 0043 is read as a number, so the zeros are helpfully removed and saved away permanently. Three defenses:

Use a prefix. AST-0043 is unambiguously text and no spreadsheet will touch it.
Import, do not open. Use import-text and set the column type to Text before it loads.
Never round-trip a file. Treat a saved CSV's ID column as suspect.

An importer that reads every column as text keeps padded codes intact on the way in — but it cannot restore zeros a spreadsheet already ate before the file was saved. Protect the file first, import second.

The manufacturer serial. Your number is the identity; the serial is an attribute. Record it verbatim, exactly as printed including dashes and letter case — warranty claims, recalls, service calls and insurance all ask for their number, not yours. Pick the one field that will hold it before you start tagging: either the notes field, or a Serial attribute added by hand to the item, since there is no field named for a manufacturer serial. They are not equivalent later — notes can be filled from a spreadsheet column on import, while a field you add yourself is filled one item at a time — by hand or via the Assistant. Use the same one on every asset: a serial recorded in three different places is a serial nobody can find.

Field chosen: ______________________________

5. Renumbering ledger — only if you are migrating an existing scheme

Do it by attrition, not in a weekend. Freeze the old scheme today, start the new one in a range that cannot collide, and retag on contact — when a thing comes back from a job, goes in for service, or gets counted. Keep the old number forever. It is still out there in maintenance logs, lease documents and people's memory, and deleting it is what turns a migration into a data loss.

#	Old number	New number	Item	Date retagged	Retagged by

InventoryQuick keeps your own item code and a separate barcode field on each item, so your scheme and the scannable code do not overwrite one another — and locations are picked from your own list rather than scanned. 7-day free trial at inventoryquick.com. Full guide: asset numbering scheme.