A property management firm administered a portfolio whose common-area assets — plant, safety equipment, fixtures across dozens of buildings — were tracked in a spreadsheet maintained by whoever touched it last. The insurance schedule was maintained separately by the broker. Depreciation was recalculated by hand each June.
The difficulty
The register and the insurance schedule had drifted into open disagreement: the broker listed 240 items, the spreadsheet 180, and neither matched the buildings. When a storm damaged plant across three properties, the claim took months because every item had to be evidenced from scratch. Maintenance was reactive by necessity — with no service history per asset, nobody could see a failure coming.
Project snapshot
- SectorProperty Management
- Modules deployedInsight Assets, Insight Ledger
- Duration9 weeks, including the portfolio stocktake
- Written up withClient permission; identifying detail removed
Numbers quoted in this study were measured by the client before and after the change — they are not our estimates. Where a figure could not be measured cleanly, it has been left out rather than rounded flatteringly.
What we changed
We loaded the broker’s insurance schedule as the authoritative starting list (the more disciplined of the two sources), then ran a scanning stocktake across the portfolio with barcode labels: every asset found, added, or reconciled against the schedule, with variances reported to the directors weekly. Insight Assets took over depreciation on the schedules the accountants already used, and the maintenance calendar was populated from the service records that survived. Insight Ledger integration connected asset purchases to the right cost centres from the day of go-live, so the register now updates itself from procurement.
The results
- Register and insurance schedule reconciled to within a handful of deliberately uninsured items.
- The following storm claim settled in weeks, evidenced from the register directly.
- June depreciation runs in an afternoon, reviewed rather than recalculated.
- Reactive call-outs are down; the calendar surfaces what is due before it fails.
The stocktake reported variances weekly, and the register reconciled with the insurance schedule item by item.
If your organisation looks like this one
If you suspect the register has drifted, reconcile the schedule at the next insurance renewal, before you sign it. Anchor on the most disciplined list (usually the broker’s), label everything that moves, and use software that updates the register from procurement.
To see how a project like this would run against your own calendar and numbers, ask us for a written quote — A register rescue is scoped from your insurance schedule in a single workshop.