Asset Handover

Who holds what, and handover documents

Seeing everything one person has been issued, producing a document for them to sign, and laying that document out yourself. The technical version is Asset handover — Developer Guide.

Asked for in discussion #56 by Daniel (dschipfel). Shipped in 605811aa and 2aed483e.

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The problem

Assets could always be assigned to people, but the register is organised by asset. Answering "what has Alice actually got?" meant searching the list one item at a time and hoping you had found everything — which is exactly the question you need answered during onboarding, a hardware swap, an audit, or somebody's last day.

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1. Who holds what

Assets → Users.

The list on the left is everybody currently holding equipment, with a count beside each name. Search by name or email if it is long.

Somebody holding nothing does not appear. The list answers "who has kit", so an empty person is not an entry — they are simply not on it.

Click a person and you get everything assigned to them: type, name, make and model, serial number, asset tag, and the date each item was assigned. That is the list an audit or an offboarding check actually needs, on one screen.

Equipment is assigned on the asset itself, so if somebody is missing here, or an item looks wrong, open the asset and check its assigned user.

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2. The handover document

The Handover document button produces a record of what that person holds:

• who they are
• every item, with serial numbers and asset tags
• when each was assigned
• a declaration that the equipment remains the organisation's property
• a signature line for them, and one for IT

Your company logo appears on it if you have set one under System → Branding, so it looks like the rest of your paperwork.

Three ways to use it:

Print	The browser's print dialogue
PDF	Save as PDF inside that same dialogue — the text stays selectable and searchable, not a screenshot
Email to them	Sends it straight to the person, laid out in the body of the message rather than as an attachment, so it can be read on a phone without downloading anything

There is no separate "generate PDF" button because there does not need to be one: every platform's print dialogue produces a PDF, and using it means the printed copy and the PDF can never drift apart.

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3. Designing the document

Assets → Settings → Handover document.

The document is built from sections. For each one you can:

• switch it off — a tick box on every section
• move it — arrows to reorder
• change the wording — headings, the introduction, the declaration, the signature labels, the footer
• choose columns — on the equipment table: type, name, make and model, serial, asset tag, assigned date, location, status, notes

The sections are: company logo, title, introduction, person details, equipment table, declaration, signatures, footer.

Merge codes

Text fields accept merge codes that fill themselves in when a document is produced:

Code	Becomes
{{employee.name}}	The person's name
{{employee.email}}	Their email address
{{employee.id}}	Their record number
{{asset_count}}	How many items they hold
{{date}}	Today's date
{{analyst.name}}	Whoever is producing the document

Click a code in the palette and it drops in where you were last typing.

A code you mistype is left alone rather than blanked, so it appears in the preview as itself. That is deliberate: "I mistyped something" is a much easier thing to notice than a mysteriously empty line.

The preview is the real thing

The panel on the right is not an approximation. It is rendered by exactly the same code that produces the printed document and the email, so it cannot show you something the finished document will not produce.

Several templates

Keep as many as you like — an onboarding pack and a leaver's checklist, say — and mark one as the default. That default is what the Handover document button uses.

An installation that never opens the designer still gets a complete, sensible document. There is nothing to set up before the feature works.

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Permissions

Capability	Grants
Access to the Assets module	Seeing who holds what, and producing a handover document
assets.handover	The Settings tab — designing the document

Note the split: designing the document is administration, producing one is not. Withholding assets.handover stops somebody changing the template; it does not stop them printing a handover for a new starter.

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Related pages

• Asset handover — Developer Guide
• Assets — the module overview