Buying Equipment
One purchase from the shelf that ran low to the write-off years later — the reorder point that raises the requisition, the approval it needs, the supplier and the purchase order, the delivery that arrives six short, and then depreciation, servicing and a disposal an auditor will accept.
A purchase order is a promise to spend money you have not spent yet
Most school inventory systems are registers of what you own. That is the easy half, and it starts too late. The hard half is everything either side of it: the shortage nobody noticed until the term started, the requisition that sat in somebody’s inbox, the supplier whose phone number left with the last bursar, the delivery that was six cartons short and was signed for anyway, and the five years of depreciation and servicing that a single purchase commits a school to. This walkthrough follows one purchase across all of it — raised in the store room, approved and placed by the office, received against the order it was placed on, and finally written down, serviced and disposed of on the school’s own books. Every screen is the real application.
On this page
The need is a number, not a memo
Nothing here starts with somebody remembering. It starts with a quantity falling under a level the school set in advance, on a page the store keeper opens anyway — which is the only version of this that survives a busy term.
What is on the shelf, and what is under its line
Stock control: every consumable line with what is on hand, the reorder point it is measured against, its ABC class and its unit cost. Below it, the physical count sessions — because a figure in a system that has never been counted against the shelf is a guess with a database behind it.
Raising the requisition
A requirement is the store room asking for something — a title, a priority, a date it is needed by and an estimate. It is deliberately not a purchase order: nobody in the store room can commit the school’s money, and the two documents exist so that the person who knows what is needed and the person who is allowed to spend can be different people.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “The need is a number, not a memo” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Who you buy from, and what you promise them
The requisition arrives somewhere else entirely: with the person who holds the budget. Their two questions are who supplies this, and what are we committing to — and the platform keeps a register for each.
The supplier register
Who the school buys from, what they supply, and how to reach them. It reads as administrative housekeeping until the day the person who knew the number leaves — which is what the fourth card on the row is about: one supplier here has neither an email nor a phone number, because somebody added them from a delivery note.
The purchase order — and what actually turned up
The register of committed money. Each order carries its vendor, its total, the date it is required by, and its position in an approval chain that ends with a PO number being issued. The column that earns the page is the last one: an order here was delivered, signed for, and was six toner cartridges short — and the discrepancy is on the record rather than in somebody’s memory.
See this on your own school’s data.
Every screen in “Who you buy from, and what you promise them” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
And then it stops being an order and starts being a thing you own
What arrives divides in two, and the division is the single most useful distinction in this module: a quantity of something, or an individually tagged object with a life of its own. Only the second kind can be handed to a named person and asked for back.
Tagged, and given a custodian
The eight microscopes on that lab order become eight rows, each with its own tag, serial number, category, condition and custodian. From this moment the object has a history — where it is, who has it, when it was last serviced — and that history is what every later screen in this walkthrough is reading.
Set this up for your team.
Every screen in “And then it stops being an order and starts being a thing you own” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
What owning it costs, and how it ends
The purchase is the cheap part. A school that buys forty laptops has committed to depreciating them, servicing them, and eventually disposing of them in a way that survives an audit — and all three are consequences of one decision made in Step 2.
Depreciation, run rather than estimated
Schedules per asset class, and the runs that have actually been posted against them. The point is that the book value on the school’s accounts is produced from the asset register itself, so an asset that was disposed of in March is not still depreciating in July because a spreadsheet was not updated.
Servicing, and what it costs
Scheduled tasks against templates for each asset class, ad-hoc repairs logged against the object, and a completion history. Included here rather than in the store-room phase because the question it answers is financial: an asset serviced twice a year for six years cost considerably more than its purchase order said.
And getting it off the books properly
Disposal as a request with a plan, an approval and its compliance paperwork, rather than a row being deleted. This is the step schools skip, and it is the one an auditor asks about: what happened to the twelve laptops, who authorised it, what were they worth, and where is the certificate.
Ready to run your school on this?
Every screen in “What owning it costs, and how it ends” is the live product, not a mockup. Create your school account, or have us walk you through it on a call.
Run your whole school on one connected platform
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