IT asset management software: what a 118-seat fleet count found

A 118-seat freight forwarder in Bhiwandi had every device on a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was wrong in both directions.

09:05 on a Tuesday, and the awkward question arrived from Rotterdam.

A 118-seat freight forwarding company outside Bhiwandi had just won work with a European shipper, whose compliance team sent across a vendor questionnaire, forty-one items long. Sameer, who runs their IT alone, answered forty of them before lunch.

Item eleven stopped him. Provide a current inventory of all devices that store or access our shipment data, with owner and location.

He had a spreadsheet. He had had a spreadsheet since 2021. He opened it, sat with it a while, and then he called us.

I am Priya. One disclosure before we go further. We sell device management as a service, so I have an interest in you finding this hard, which is exactly why I will tell you when the free tool is the right answer.

Here is the part buyers get wrong. They treat this as a software purchase. It is a bookkeeping habit that happens to need software. The tool holds whatever you put in it, faithfully, including your mistakes.

Six days, three locations, and a count nobody enjoyed

We did it the boring way. Physical count, floor by floor, matched against the sheet afterwards. Head office above the warehouse in Bhiwandi, a four-desk documentation cabin near Nhava Sheva, and a branch in Nagpur that reports to sales and buys its own everything.

Six working days. Here is what came out.

The spreadsheet held 118 rows. Of those, 104 pointed at a machine somebody could physically produce. Fourteen rows described machines that no longer existed on any floor. Two had been stolen from a car in 2023. The rest had died and gone out with a scrap dealer, and nobody went back to close the row.

Then we walked the other direction, counting machines and looking for their row. We found 131 devices in daily use. Twenty-seven had never been entered at all.

So the register was wrong twice over. Fourteen ghosts, twenty-seven missing machines. Sameer had not been careless. He was the only person maintaining it, and he had been maintaining the joining side.

The mistake I made on day one

I want to be honest about this, because the mistake is the lesson.

I went in expecting the gap to be old machines. That is the usual shape. Laptops retired, rows left open, a count that quietly overstates what you own. I spent most of the first day chasing retirements and feeling productive about it.

The real exposure pointed the other way. Nagpur had bought eleven laptops over three years on local invoices that went to accounts and never touched IT. A shared desktop in the dispatch cabin, on an unsupported operating system, held shipment records going back to 2022. Two machines belonged to consultants who left and never returned them.

An amber signal I read as background noise on Monday was the whole story by Thursday. The devices nobody knew about were the ones holding the data the questionnaire asked about.

What IT asset management software costs, and what it does not solve

Three tools kept coming up on Sameer’s shortlist. You will meet the same three, so here is what we found pricing them for a 131-device company with one IT person.

Snipe-IT is open source and free to self-host, with no cap on assets or users. Their FAQ confirms nothing is held back from the free version, and hosted accounts start at 39.99 US dollars a month if you would rather not run the server.* Two honest downsides. It does not go and find your devices, so somebody types them in. And self-hosting means you patch it. A critical access-control flaw, CVE-2026-37709, affected every Snipe-IT release before 8.4.1. A neglected asset register is still a web application on your network.

ManageEngine AssetExplorer comes from Zoho, worth saying in India: built in Chennai, support hours that overlap yours. Their licence terms grant a free edition covering 25 IT assets in perpetuity. It discovers devices on the network rather than waiting for typing. But twenty-five is a hard limit, and 131 is not 25.

Freshservice puts asset management inside a service desk and prices per agent, not per device. It starts at the Growth tier, with managed assets metered separately as asset units bought in packs of 500.* Sameer is one agent. That surprised him, as it surprises most buyers who assume per-device pricing.

Read the last row against the rest. Every column fails at the same place, and it is not a feature gap.

What I told Sameer

Buy the hosted one, and not for the reason he expected.

AssetExplorer was out on the number alone. Snipe-IT was tempting, because it is free and it is good, and I steered him off it anyway. One man running IT for three locations should not also be the person patching a web application the week a critical advisory drops. That is not a knock on the software. It is arithmetic about his Tuesdays.

Freshservice at one agent gave him discovery, one console and somebody else’s patching schedule. Hire a second IT person next year and the licence follows the person, not the fleet.

Then the part that mattered more than the tool. We wrote down who updates the record and when. New joiner, the row is created before the laptop leaves the store room. Exit, the row closes on the same form finance uses to clear the final salary. Branch purchase, no reimbursement without an asset row. That last rule fixed Nagpur in one quarter and cost nothing.

We have seen this count go wrong afterwards at enough Indian companies to know where. The register decays fastest at handover, when a laptop moves desks quietly. That is why we hold client fleets inside our device lifecycle management practice rather than handing over a login and wishing people luck, and why we wrote a plain explainer on what the lifecycle covers.

Item eleven went back to Rotterdam eleven days later. 131 rows, an owner and a location against each. Accepted without a follow-up question.

If you are doing this count yourself

Four things, in this order.

Count the machines before you buy the tool. A physical count is the only thing that tells you how wrong you are today, and that number decides your tier. Under 25 devices, take the free AssetExplorer edition and keep your money.

Fix the two directions separately. Ghost rows are an accuracy problem. Missing machines are a data-protection problem. The second is what a client questionnaire finds, and the DPDP Act has no headcount exemption, so a 118-seat firm carries the same duty as a 2,500-device insurer. Our DPDP readiness checklist for HR and IT teams covers the paperwork side.

Write down who updates the record, on which day, triggered by what. One page, taped inside the store room door if you must. A register with no named owner is a spreadsheet again within two quarters.

Close the row when the machine leaves. Retirement is where registers rot and where data walks out. We covered the safe way in what to do with old office laptops, and the certificate trail in our IT asset disposition service. Buying past 50 devices this year, price Device-as-a-Service too, because the register comes built in.

* Vendor pricing and edition limits are current at the time of writing and change without notice. Dollar figures are listed as the vendor publishes them. Confirm the India-billed number and the asset cap on a written quote. Device counts come from one anonymised 118-seat client fleet, not a benchmark study.