Dallas Independent School District capital assets accounting manager Patrick Opoku needed help.
Responsible for maintaining an inventory of his organization’s assets – including more $6 million in capital assets alone – Patrick and his crew were manually inventorying assets using spreadsheets, which they then uploaded into Oracle to support GASB34 reporting.
Their process posed two challenges: 1) It was incredibly time-consuming; and 2) it lacked an auditable way to document that they had followed the correct steps and accounted for all assets.
While researching barcode scanners to speed up data entry, Patrick says a Zebra account rep recommended RedBeam Asset Tracking.
Our support team worked with Patrick to get him and his team started.
“I thought there was going to be a long learning curve,” Patrick says, adding that once his team jumped in and started using the application, he quickly saw this was not the case.
He says he appreciates how easy RedBeam makes it to identify “found” and “unfound” assets, so he knows immediately what has been inventoried. He also likes being able to quickly see the age of assets and add custom fields, and that his teams can append asset records with their notes.
With RedBeam Asset Tracking, Patrick and his teams have closed their inventory cycle down to less than a year – a significant time savings over the two- to four-year cycles they had been used to.
“For as big as we are, if we didn’t close in on the inventory cycle, by the time we came back [to check out any discrepancies], there were always a lot of movements,” Patrick explains. “With RedBeam, we have a much closer cycle and a better handle on things.”