It’s a familiar scene in small companies. A piece of equipment breaks down, and the question flies: “who bought this, and when?” The answer lived in Sophie’s head, over in accounting — and she’s on holiday. Or worse: she left the company six months ago, taking the purchase history with her.
Tacit knowledge, the weak spot of small businesses
In a small or medium-sized business, equipment tracking rarely rests on a system. It rests on people:
- the person who negotiated the purchase knows the supplier and the date;
- the person who took delivery knows where the invoice is filed;
- the person who looks after the equipment knows “roughly” what’s still under warranty.
As long as those people are around, it holds. The trouble is that none of this knowledge is written down anywhere. A departure, sick leave, a reorganization — and the information is gone.
What that costs in practice
On top of that comes the lost time: digging through a former employee’s e-mails, calling the supplier back, leafing through binders. For a single device, that’s half a day. Across a whole fleet, it’s a recurring drain.
A spreadsheet only half solves it
Many companies try a shared Excel file. It’s better than nothing, but it just moves the problem: who keeps it up to date? Where are the invoices it refers to? Who gets notified when a warranty is about to expire? A spreadsheet doesn’t attach proof of purchase and alerts no one.
Getting the tracking out of people’s heads
The goal is simple: turn tacit, personal knowledge into shared, persistent information linked to the proof. For every piece of equipment, you want to know, regardless of who’s in the office:
- the purchase date and the supplier;
- the invoice, attached to the item;
- the warranty length and expiry date;
- its location and, where relevant, who’s responsible for it.
Keept: the company’s memory, not one person’s
That’s exactly what Keept centralizes. Every piece of equipment carries its invoice, its date and its warranty, in a workspace shared between several users. When someone leaves, the information stays. And the app automatically warns you before each expiry date — without depending on anyone’s memory. Equipment no longer becomes orphaned the day someone walks out the door.