Help convince CTO desktop peripheral are consumables and not assets to be tagged

[u/No-Barber964]

Our company has been asset tagging everything at a desk to ensure that we can control the full lifecycle of hardware from procurement to disposal.

I’m trying to shift our process for the desk level hardware to only tag monitors as an asset and make keyboards/mouse, webcam, docking stations as consumables that we wouldn’t asset tag and only classify as consumables to track inventory levels

Our cto is consented we will loose visibility into where things are going and why we have to continually purchase more hardware when the firm isn’t growing

Any advice ?

Edit.. to add more context on the dollar amount of each model as many are saying to set a $ threshold

Monitor - $350 Headset - $250 Webcam- $160 Docking station - $100 Keyboard/mouse - $60

[u/chillzatl]

Anything that wears out from use is a consumable. Computers and monitors fail, but nobody would really call that "wearing out".

Keyboards, mice, batteries, headsets, etc all wear out from use and there's no consistent, definable timeline for that.

It's simple capex vs. opex.

[u/gregcantspell → u/chillzatl]

This right here. Can you assign the consumable to an individual? That might solve the desire to track these without asset tagging.

Take the analog version of pens and notepads. We’re not tagging those, the overhead to track it costs more than the benefit. If we suddenly start ordering 30x more pens we’re going to look into it and can the idiot who’s stealing to sell them on amazon.

Same thing applies here. Things that wear out are consumables. Keyboards break, they fail, people spill sugary coffee into them. If you can assign the consumable to an individual, and you can see one employee has consumed more than others then you have a person problem, not a technology problem.

[u/MorpH2k → u/gregcantspell]

Exactly this. Tracking them as consumables achieves the same thing for this purpose but without the extra work of it being an asset.

[u/Rentun → u/chillzatl]

Everything wears out from use. That's not really the defining characteristic of whether you should track something or not.

You should track stuff if it's worth the effort, which generally means a dollar amount threshold.

If you install an LED lightbulb, it will generally outlive the most expensive servers you'd ever buy. You're not going to track that lightbulb though, because it costs like five bucks, and it'll cost you more then five bucks to track it.

[u/mahsab → u/chillzatl]

capex vs opex doesn't have anything to do with "wearing out"