What Companies Use for IT Asset Tracking and When Those Tools Fall Short
28 November 2025
updated at: 28 November 2025
To keep track of their assets, organizations use a wide range of solutions, often adapting them to best fit their business needs. But as a company grows and its IT landscape gets more complicated, these tools start to show their limits and can't always keep up with the pace of business. Let's take a look at the common approaches to IT asset management used today and explore why the systems you're familiar with might not be enough when it comes to making strategic decisions.
What Tools Are Companies Using for Asset Tracking Today?
The most popular approaches in 2025 usually fall into one of these categories:
- Excel and Other Spreadsheets
For many companies, especially those just starting to build out their asset tracking processes, Excel is the most accessible tool out there. It doesn't cost anything extra in licensing, it's simple to use, and it lets you quickly create a basic list of your assets. - Financial Systems (like 1C, SAP, Oracle, etc.)
Many organizations keep their IT asset records inside their financial systems, where they're already tracking fixed assets and tangible goods for accounting purposes. These systems are great for keeping an eye on the financial side of your assets and managing payments with vendors. This work is typically handled by the finance department, not IT. - ITSM Systems (using a CMDB)
Companies that have already adopted IT service management practices use their ITSM solutions for logging incidents, handling service requests, and managing changes. These systems are usually built around a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which holds information about all the components of your IT infrastructure and their dependencies. However, things like financial data and details regarding asset custodians aren't really the focus of these systems. - Discovery Systems (for Automated Inventory)
Organizations with a more mature IT infrastructure often use specialized tools for automatically discovering and taking inventory of their equipment configurations. These systems can track not just what devices you have, but also their performance, specs, and what software is installed on them, giving you a precise, real-time picture of every piece of your IT infrastructure.
A Closer Look at These Asset Tracking Tools
Each of the tools we've mentioned has its own strengths and weaknesses (limitations). Let's dig into the details of each approach to understand where they shine, and at what point you might need to start thinking about moving to a more comprehensive system.
| Use Cases | When You Might Outgrow It | The Built-in Limitations | |
| Excel | Great for companies with a small number of assets (up to 1,000) where you don't need to automate tracking and 1–2 employees can be dedicated to managing the spreadsheet. It's also a good starting point for organizations that are just beginning to build an asset tracking system. | When your company starts to expand to new locations or add more legal entities. When the number of assets grows so much that managing it all by hand becomes inefficient. Or, when your management processes become more mature and you realize you need to move from a collection of files to a real digital solution. | It's a ton of work to fill out and keep the data up to date. The risk of errors from manual data entry is huge. It's almost impossible to keep track of when equipment is issued, moved, upgraded, or retired in real-time. There's no way to automate your purchasing plans, which means your team wastes a lot of time just gathering information. And as the tracking is done in separate files, the information can be completely different from what's in your official accounting systems. |
| Accounting Systems | Perfect for organizations that are already using them to handle the accounting for their physical assets and to manage payments with vendors. This work is usually done by the finance team, not the IT department. | When you realize you need to track not just the accounting side of things, but also the actual physical presence, condition, and movement of your IT equipment. | These systems are built for accounting, plain and simple. They don't have the features you need to manage an asset through its entire lifecycle or to automatically monitor its technical health. They're also extremely difficult to integrate with a company's other IT systems, like the Service Desk or ERP, which makes it hard to connect with other business processes. |
| ITSM Systems | Ideal for organizations that have already adopted IT service management and are using their ITSM solution for logging incidents, handling service requests, and managing changes. These systems are usually built around a CMDB. | When you need to go beyond just managing IT services and get into comprehensive asset management. This means you need to control costs, plan purchases, track who's responsible for what, and manage your inventory. | ITSM systems are focused on delivering and supporting IT services, not on managing assets themselves. The CMDB that comes with an ITSM system has information about your IT infrastructure components and how they're connected, but it often leaves out the financial details and the full lifecycle history of your equipment. |
| Discovery Systems | Best for organizations with a well-developed IT infrastructure that need to keep a close eye on the technical health of their equipment. These systems can automatically find devices and collect data on their configuration. They're typically managed by the IT department. | When you realize you need to bring some order to your asset management processes. It's not enough to just monitor the technical side; you also need to plan your budget, assign responsibility, and manage the full lifecycle of your IT equipment. | These systems are great at collecting detailed technical data about your IT infrastructure for visualizing reports and feeding it into other systems. But they don't have the features you need to actually build asset management processes, like controlling and approving actions with assets, or planning and tracking your IT costs. |
The Solution: ITAM Systems
When existing tools can no longer keep up with an organization's growing needs for IT asset management, the best solution is to bring in a specialized ITAM (IT Asset Management) system. These systems give you a comprehensive way to track and enable the management of all aspects of the IT asset lifecycle.
How does ITAM work with your current tools?
The great thing about ITAM systems is that they don't require you to completely abandon the solutions you're already using — they can integrate with your existing infrastructure.
For example, they can pull technical information from your monitoring and automated inventory systems, they can exchange data with your accounting systems to track costs, and they can sync with your ITSM solutions to enrich your service management with valuable asset information.
Organized and automated asset management
ITAM solutions bring a structured approach to asset management and let you handle a wide range of tasks: plan your spending, gather the IT equipment needs from all your departments, control your inventory, issue equipment based on requests, track changes as it's being used, and keep an eye on what is being written off and disposed of. By automating these routine tasks, you can cut down on the time spent on tracking, lower the risk of unauthorized actions, and free up the IT department's resources for more important tasks.
Centralized access to data
An ITAM system acts as a single point of access for all your asset information, and you can drill down into all sorts of details:
- How are your assets distributed across different departments or legal entities?
- How much equipment and how many licenses do you have available, and what do you need to buy?
- What is the current condition and movement history of any given asset?
- How much is your current IT equipment fleet costing you, and how are those costs broken down?
This information gives IT directors everything they need to make smart, informed decisions about how to manage the company's IT resources.
Automatic security control and flexible reporting
It's just as important to manage your tracking in a way that meets your information security requirements and to control who has access to the data. Modern ITAM solutions come with flexible, role-based access models that let you set up permissions for using resources and automate the approval processes for all asset-related operations. This not only keeps your data secure but also makes every action taken with your equipment completely transparent.
At the same time, you also need tools for generating analytical reports — from standard reports on what's in your warehouse to complex dashboards that show you how your assets are distributed, the overall health of your equipment, and how your IT infrastructure costs are changing over time.
The synergy with ITSM systems
Even though ITAM and ITSM are two different areas of IT management that focus on different business processes, they actually share similar goals: to make sure that a company's investment in IT is best serving the needs of both the organization and its end-users.
When you combine ITAM with your ITSM processes, you create an incredibly powerful tool for managing your IT infrastructure:
- Information about when equipment is issued or returned is automatically updated as the requests are processed in your Service Desk.
- When an incident is logged, your support specialists can immediately see all the technical specs and the usage history of the problematic device.
- Data on your equipment inventory helps you plan your resources more effectively for supporting your users;
- Your reports on the cost of providing IT services and supporting your infrastructure become as complete as possible, bringing together all the key pieces of the puzzle.
Summary
The best approach to IT asset management really depends on the size and specific needs of your organization. Small companies might be just fine with basic tools like Excel spreadsheets. But for large organizations with a complex IT infrastructure, where the operational and financial risks are much higher, it makes a lot of sense to implement a specialized ITAM solution to complement your accounting and automated device inventory systems.
A comprehensive ITAM system doesn't just fill the limitations and gaps left by your other tools; it completely transforms your approach to asset management. You move from just reacting to problems to proactively planning for the future. This approach gives you data transparency, helps you optimize your spending, and reduces risks for your business.
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So, what tools are you using to track your IT assets? Have you ever run into situations where your current solution just isn't enough, and how did you solve that problem?
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